


Bones Buried Deep

by Nightfoot



Category: Tales of Vesperia
Genre: Flynn is trans, Horror, M/M, Modern AU, Paranormal Investigators, Supernatual Elements, cw: domestic violence, cw: parental abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 99,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22929844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightfoot/pseuds/Nightfoot
Summary: Brave Vesperia is Zaphias' leading crew of paranormal investigators.  They've been called in to get to the bottom of the alleged haunting of Zaphias Castle, a mansion with a history of mysterious disappearances.  It's obvious this haunting is more serious than anything they've confronted before, but they should be safe so long as they remember the cardinal rule of the castle: Never go anywhere alone.
Relationships: Yuri Lowell/Flynn Scifo
Comments: 39
Kudos: 76
Collections: Tales Big Bang 2020





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as part of the 2019-2020 Tales Big Bang! And also the... third, I think, haunted house Vesperia fic I've written. I like haunted house stories - hope you do, too! I'll be posting every other day or so.
> 
> Also, there are some elements of Jewish culture in this story. I did my best to be accurate and respectful, but if there's anything I could change, let me know! I'm happy to learn more.

Yuri Lowell, proud member of Zaphias’ finest ghost hunting team, did not believe in ghosts. Some clients claimed this was like being a deer hunter who thought the concept of dear was an invention by Big Hunting, but Yuri figured there was no better person to make a conclusion about the existence of ghosts than someone who spent all their free time looking for them. Besides, if they advertised their true purpose, a homeowner convinced they had a haunted house worthy not only of a movie deal but a whole damn cinematic universe would not contact “Zaphias Carbon Monoxide and Drafty Attic Inspectors.”

Not that everyone on the team was on the same page. Yuri’s walkie-talkie crackled and Karol’s voice came through clear enough to reveal his nerves. “Are you sure you don’t want me or - or someone else to go get it with you?”

“Nah, don’t waste your time.” Yuri held the walkie-talkie with one hand as he used the other to shove the heavy, grime-encrusted backstage door open. “Help the others load up the van and I’ll be down in a minute.”

It was almost four in the morning and Mountain Dew could only repel Yuri’s drowsiness for so long. He would be glad to get home soon, especially because it had been one of those boring nights where nothing allegedly supernatural had happened and all they’d done was screw around in a dark building for five hours.

His Majesty’s Theatre in downtown Zaphias had supported rumours of ghosts for as long as anyone could remember. Considering it had been built almost 150 years ago, that was plenty of time to acquire a ghostly sighting or two. Audience members sometimes claimed to have seen a shadowed figure lurking in a top box, and actors hated being alone backstage due to the alleged feeling of being watched. Brave Vesperia had been at the theatre since ten o’clock, after getting special permission from the owner to be there overnight, but they hadn’t experienced any of the alleged phenomena. Rita didn’t even have any interesting heat signatures or EMP readings to find an explanation for.

The most supernatural thing that had happened all night was that Yuri could have sworn Flynn had already brought video camera number three down to the first floor. Apparently he had not, because it was still unaccounted for when Flynn went through his checklist at Raven’s van five minutes ago.

“Where is number three, anyway?” Yuri asked the walkie-talkie once he was shut inside the dark hallway. His hand slapped the old plaster wall until it landed on the light switch. Fluorescent lights sprung to life one-by-one down the hall, illuminating the doors to various dressing and storage rooms.

Karol’s reply came through quickly. “Uh…. Hold on, let me ask Flynn.”

Moments later, Karol’s voice was replaced by Flynn’s. “That was the one I put on the catwalk, remember? To film into the top balcony box?”

“’Course it is.” The one at the very top, naturally. Damn, he was too tired to climb all the way up there. He regretted offering to go back for the camera in the first place.

“I can get it if you want,” Flynn offered.

“No, don’t worry about it - I’m already in here.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. Typical Flynn, tripping over himself to be helpful. “Sit your ass in the van and I’ll be down with it in ten.”

The hallway ended in a door leading to public areas, with a staircase sitting perpendicular to the hall. They’d been tromping up and down it all night, but it was only now that he was alone in the building that Yuri noticed how loud his footsteps were. The wooden steps creaked with every step, and something about the shape of the hallways made his steps echo, as if someone else was climbing the stairs right behind him.

The stairs let out on an open space in the wings of the stage. Yuri flicked on the light, which bled past the curtains and onto the stage proper. The main curtain had been drawn back to facilitate their investigation, but the single lightbulb in the wing wasn’t enough to make it past the stage and reveal the seats. It did, however, illuminate the dark metal stairs that zigzagged thirty feet up to the catwalk over the stage.

Footsteps on the stairs behind him brightened his spirits. Thank god, one of his friends has come to get it instead, and by the height and weight of the presence that stopped just behind him, it was probably Raven.

Yuri spoke as he turned. “Here to relieve me, old-?” Yuri paused mid-turn and blinked at the empty stairwell. Goosebumps ran down his spine. He’d been certain he felt the presence of another human standing right behind him, so he impulsively pressed his back against the wall, closing the space where something could lurk.

“Anybody there?”

The cavernous emptiness of the dark stage magnified the absence of a response. Damn, it must be late if even he was getting jumpy. Usually that was Karol and Rita’s job.

Yuri shook his head and directed himself to the stairs. They rattled as he made his way up to the first landing. He paused on the grating for just a second, and then the light turned off. “Oh, come on,” he muttered and felt in his pocket for his cellphone. Grumbling to himself about property owners and burnt-out bulbs, he turned on the flashlight function. The tiny light from his phone was just enough to show where his feet needed to go.

Clang, clang, clang. The whole staircase rattled as he moved up, each step echoing. Except, that didn’t make sense, because his steps might be rattling but nowhere near loud enough to echo. That wasn’t an echo, but a second set of steps shadowing him up the stairs. Yuri froze - silence. No phantom climbing the stairs. He rubbed his eyes and kept moving, ignoring the second set of steps he swore he heard right behind him.

The stairs let out on another metal mesh of a landing. Here, a wall of circuits, outlets, and plugs stood beside the actual catwalk that stretched over the stage. With only his tiny phone light and the light from the first floor hallway leaking in from below, the catwalk looked like a bridge over a black sea. Halfway across, red light still recording, was the camera on a tripod.

In search of more light, he grabbed the cord that hung from the wall in a loop for the stage lights and plugged it in. Blinding light forced him to shut his eyes after being in the dark for so long, leaving a human silhouette emblazoned in the fuzzy colours blurring on his eyelids. It made his heart skip a beat and he opened his eyes as soon as he could, squinting across the catwalk at… nobody. He saw nothing but a mess of dangling cords, ropes, and sandbags. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and hesitated at the edge of the platform. He really had been awake too long if his mind was playing this many tricks on him.

Still staring at the empty space along the catwalk, Yuri lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Flynn? You’re sure no one else was in the building tonight, right?”

He waited for a response. By the time his eyes had adjusted to the bright lights, he still hadn’t heard a response. “Flynn? Are you there?”

The walkie-talkie crackled with bits and pieces of Flynn’s voice breaking through the static. Yuri slapped it, but when percussive maintenance failed to clarify Flynn’s voice, he clipped it to his belt and pulled out his phone. He typed out a quick message to Flynn - walkie’s acting up, be down soon \- and then watched the little status say sending for a good thirty seconds until it gave up and spat back an error message.

By now, Yuri was too annoyed to do anything but slip his phone back in his pocket and and set off for the camera. The same electromagnet frequencies that tended to create “ghost” sightings also had a habit of interfering with cellphones, which was why they always used walkie talkies on investigations. Yuri had never experienced both devices failing, but by the time he figured out why his phone was acting up or why the walkie talkie suddenly decided it couldn’t pick up Flynn’s voice from just outside the building, he could have grabbed the camera and gone down to speak with Flynn in person.

The catwalk was old, having been built back when the theatre was new. Yuri walked across worn wooden planks that creaked under his feet and ran a hand over the rough iron railing. He glanced through the slats to the stage far below and then the lights switched off.

Yuri froze, hand on the railing, blurs of colour swimming before his eyes in the sudden darkness. “For fuck’s sake.” He pulled out his phone to renew the flashlight and peered back at the landing. The plug controlling the lights had slipped from the outlet. Yuri turned around to go back to the landing, and wasn’t sure why he checked over his shoulder as soon as he turned his back on the darkness further along the catwalk.

Yuri rested his phone on the ground and used the freed hand to run his fingers over the outlet, searching for a sign it was broken. What he found were three jagged, parallel lines scored into the metal. They ran from about two inches above the outlet down to the plastic casing and seemed to get deeper as they moved down. Nail scratches? A raccoon, maybe? He could have sworn they hadn’t been there the last time he was here, but what animal could have clawed at the outlet this aggressively and gone completely unnoticed?

The hair on the back of his neck rose and once again, he instinctively looked over his shoulder. Something was… wrong. Yuri did not believe in ghosts, but he did believe in subsonic frequencies or undetectable vibrations that could trigger a feeling of danger. One of those was no doubt responsible for why he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was on this platform with him, staring intently at his back.

Movement in the corner of his eye made his heart lurch, but a quick check at the space over the stage showed that it was only some of the dangling loops of cord swaying gently.

He still had the plug in his hand. He pushed it into the socket and then left the landing, hoping to leave the feeling of being watched behind. He did, for about five seconds. Then, when he was almost within reach of the camera, darkness plunged around him.

“Christ,” he seethed. This time, he didn’t bother going back to was clearly a broken outlet. Instead, he turned his phone flashlight on and stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. Just enough of the phone stuck out that he had a bearable amount of light.

It took two hands to turn the camera off, pick it up, and fold the tripod together. This would be easier in proper light, but he wasn’t totally blind and they could pack it up properly outside. Tripod over his shoulder and camera in hand, Yuri finally began the walk back to the van.

His pool of light bounced wildly over the floorboards with every step. Yuri made himself slow down so that he could see the narrow catwalk confidently, ignoring the untraceable urge to run and get out of here as fast as he could. He was so intent on just getting out of here that he jumped when the walkie talkie crackled. He waited to hear Flynn or Karol, or even one of the others, but all he got were spurts of static.

He paused to rest the tripod against the railing and pressed the button. “Flynn? Can you hear me?”

Static. Yuri was about started walking again when the static cut off. There was a moment of listening to the soft fuzz of a silent connection, until it was replaced by a soft exhale. Yuri stared at his walkie-talkie with a confused frown as he listened to someone steadily breathe in and out.

“Flynn? Is that you?” Flynn was terrible with technology, but Yuri didn’t think he was so incompetent that he’d turn the walkie-talkie on without realizing. “Karol?” Except Flynn and Karol were by now sitting in the van with everyone else, chatting about the night and getting ready to go home. Yuri would hear the others in the background, instead of this eerie silence filled only by steady breathing. “Knock it off, Judy. I’m not in the mood for a prank tonight.” When the breathing didn’t stop, Yuri switched the walkie-talkie off.

The catwalk creaked as he kept walking. A hanging loop of electrical wiring smacked his forehead as he failed to duck around it. His dim light gleamed on the metal of the platform only a few metres away, and the plug that was once again lying on the floor. Didn’t it seem like it was slightly too far from the outlet to have naturally fallen? Yuri thought about this for only a split second before his next step caused his phone to shift, pushing the light deeper into his pocket and blinding him.

Yuri stopped, put the tripod down, reached for his pocket, and then gasped as something closed around his throat. He dropped the camera as both hands snapped to the ligature around his neck.

His fingers clawed at a rubber-coated cord that dug into his throat. Shouts for help fizzled out into choked gasps and sputtering. He kicked, he elbowed backward, but there was no one behind him - no apparent source for the cord already making his vision fuzzy. He tried to dig a finger under the cord to release the pressure, but it was too tight. Yuri’s head thrashed as he tried to throw the invisible attacker off.

There was something behind him, but it wasn’t physical. Pure, condensed malevolence pressed against his back and Yuri fought to throw it off. His heart raced with panic, throbbing against a chest taut with the need for air. His mind had never raced so fast, but all it could race around was the idea that he was going to die, with no time to spare on wondering why this was happening or how. All he could think, over and over, was I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here!

Pressure pounded in his skull. He floated on the edge of consciousness, held aloft only by his panic. Blood rushed past his ears, making the loud crack sound like it came from far away. Then there came another crack, and the floorboards splintered. He had half a second to heave in a great gulp of air before plummeting to the ground.


	2. A New Case

Zaphias Castle was not, strictly speaking, a castle. The name had gotten attached to the Victorian stately home due to its medieval aesthetic of turrets and ramparts that, in the days before skyscrapers, had soared above the skyline of Zaphias. These days, tourists would rather take an elevator to the top of the Sword Stair Tower downtown for stunning vistas of the city, but the mansion still clung to its middling position on the top ten list of things to do in Zaphias.

The presence of tourists demanded tour guides, which was how Estelle found herself with a fun job to squeeze around classes during her first year of university. It was really the best possible job for her: she got to dress up in pretty historical costumes, and she had a captive audience who actually wanted her to gush historical facts at them for forty-five minutes.

On a late afternoon at the tail end of February, she prepared to give her last tour of the day. She stood on the gleaming wooden floors of the main hall, facing a gaggle of tourists clustered in the archway where the entry hall met the antechamber with the front door and ticket booth. There were about ten of them, which was an impressive number for a Friday afternoon in the winter.

“Welcome!” she said in her most chipper tour guide voice. “My name is Estelle and I’ll be showing you around the castle for the next forty-five minutes. I promise I won’t go over, since I know it’s getting late and the roads aren’t great this afternoon.” There was a small murmur of appreciation before she continued. “Let me just start with a couple of ground rules. In most rooms, you’ll see velvet ropes between you and the furniture. Please don’t go past the ropes! Most of the furniture in the house is original and very old. And also, please stay with me and don’t wander off by yourself!”

A young boy with a tousle of brown hair said, “That’s because of the ghost, right?”

The mother standing next to him hissed, “Don’t interrupt, Ted.”

Estelle hesitated. Everyone said that castle was haunted. It appeared on plenty of internet lists of famous haunted buildings, and a few TV specials had visited to talk about its famous paranormal activity in the past fifty years of it being open to the public. Then there were the… disappearances. The official stance was that it was nothing but coincidence, but even if Estelle wasn’t sure whether she believed in ghosts or not, it was just strange for multiple people to vanish without a trace in the same building.

“The house is very old,” she said. “Like I said about the ropes, we don’t want people to accidentally damage anything. The museum on the third floor is open to explore on your own, but you need to stay with the group on the first and second floors.”

There were always staff members milling about on the third floor, so nobody was ever really alone up there. This was important for reasons that none of them ever discussed. Never being alone in the castle was simply what they did, and had been unofficial staff policy since before the longest serving staff member had been hired.

“With those ground rules covered, let’s move into the entry hall so you can see the beautiful carved ceiling.” Estelle had worked here since September, and had long grown accustomed to walking in the several layers of fabric that came with her Edwardian maid uniform.

The group moved into the two-story chamber at the heart of the house. They passed underneath the balcony of the second floor landing and into a wood-panelled hall. Two levels of bay windows on the back wall usually let in enough sunlight to make the dark wood floor gleam, but gentle snow and an overcast sky kept the effect subdued today.

“I’m sorry for the weather today,” Estelle said. “These windows usually give a wonderful view down the hill and to the river behind the house. In the summer, I recommend having an ice cream on the back patio after the tour, but you probably aren’t interested in that today, huh?” She smiled sheepishly before continuing. “Anyway, I’m going to start by giving you a quick history of the house. It was originally built between 1889 and 1892 by Robert Tattersall. He was a self-made millionaire who’d made his fortune in the steel industry during the Industrial Revolution. The exterior resembles a castle as an aesthetic choice, but obviously it was built way after the age of castles. Robert was a bit obsessed with the castle aesthetic, which you’ll see again in the secret passages he had built. He died in 1911, and the castle was inherited by his eldest son, Nathaniel. He was the master of the house from 1911 until his death in 1934. He was a forward-thinking man and had many renovations done to install electricity, as well as an elevator.”

The little boy, Ted, spoke up again, “So is he the ghost that haunts the castle?”

Estelle faulted. “Um… well I don’t really know….”

“Ted,” his mother hissed.

In a loud whisper, Ted replied, “You promised it was haunted!”

“There are, of course, stories about the castle being haunted,” Estelle said. She noticed a few members of the crowd paying attention to her rather than the network of ceiling beams high above and decided to go for it.

“A lot of people who have worked here over the years have reported feeling cold spots, or sometimes hearing footsteps on upstairs floors where nobody should be. I can point out the spots where those were reported as we continue on. The most ghostly thing reported is the sight of a woman in a long dress walking along the second floor hallway. She’s believed to be the ghost of Alice Tattersall, Nathaniel’s wife who fell down the stairs and died in 1919.” Estelle pointed to the grand staircase of dark mahogany that led from the entry hall to the second floor.

Someone asked, “Have you ever seen her?”

“I haven’t! I kind of hope to someday, although… it would probably freak me out a bit.” Estelle giggled. She wondered if she should continue the story about the people who had disappeared in the castle over the years, but she had promised not to let the tour run over time and besides, that wasn’t part of the haunting. At least, she didn’t think it was, not really. Ghosts couldn’t just make a person disappear.

“Anyway, I think we should move on now to the library, just this way.”

Estelle had given this tour around a hundred times by now, and ran through the spiel for each room without having to think too hard about it. Despite doing this so often, she still didn’t get tired of walking below the glass ceiling of the conservatory or hearing the gasps when she opened the door disguised in the wall of the study to reveal a staircase. She loved her job, and felt privileged to work in such a beautiful building.

It was just an ordinary night until they had come down the stairs forty-five minutes later to return to the entry hall. Ted’s mother stopped and gasped, “Ted! He’s not here!”

Estelle whirled around. “What? Oh no!” She hurried through the group to meet Ted’s mother at the back. As she went, she scanned the room for any sign of the kid, but didn’t see any more Teds than his mother had. “Don’t worry. Nothing in the house is dangerous, and we’re the last tour today so there aren’t any other people around. I’m sure he just stopped to look at something and lost us. Where did you last see him?”

“Um… on the third floor,” his mother said, her expression somewhere between the terror of not knowing where her child was, and the embarrassment of being a failure of a mother for losing him.

“Ok. I’ll just go up and get him, then.” She patted Ted’s mother’s arm. To everyone else, she said, “This is the end of our tour! I’m sorry to wrap it up so abruptly, but my colleague Megan at the ticket booth will be happy to answer any questions you have on your way out!”

Estelle dashed up the stairs. There was nothing to worry about, really. Even though it was almost closing time and the staff on duty had probably already headed downstairs to get ready to go, there wasn’t anything dangerous up there. The castle rule about never going somewhere alone was just an old superstition - something she had gotten used to in her months of working here so that it felt actually important.

But she was still more relieved than she’d admit when she ran down the third floor hallway and found Ted pressing his face between his cupped hands at the rifle in the glass display case. “There you are!”

Ted jumped and spun around. “Ah! S-sorry!”

Estelle pressed a hand to the doorframe of the little museum room dedicated to Nathaniel’s regiment from the First World War and caught her breath. “It’s… it’s ok. Your mother was scared because she lost you.”

“I just wanted to look at the guns some more.” Ted fiddled with his hands and glanced at the rifles.

“Next time, ask your mom and visit the museum together. Let’s go downstairs now; it’s closing time.”

She reached for his hand, and then both of them jumped as a woman’s scream cut the silence. The shrill wail was cut off by a series of thuds that could only be someone tumbling down the stairs.

Estelle took off, dragging Ted behind her. Her first thought was that Ted’s mother had decided to come up after her, tripped, and fallen down the stairs. They hurried down to the second floor and Estelle braced herself for a horrible sight when they reached the grand staircase in the entry hall.

There was no one at the base of the stairs. The entry hall was quiet save for the soft murmuring of Ted’s mother talking to Megan the ticket agent in the antechamber. Estelle and Ted shared a confused look and then cautiously walked down the stairs.

Once on the ground, Ted ran to his mother. She gasped and embraced him, but he quickly wiggled out to ask, “Who screamed?”

His mother frowned and then looked to Estelle in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Estelle looked between her and her coworker behind the desk in the little alcove built into the wall. “Didn’t a woman scream? It sounded like a terrible accident.”

Ted’s mother shook her head slowly. “We didn’t hear anything.”

Estelle’s heart was no beating very fast. “But… I was sure we….”

Ted jumped and punched the air. “Yes! A ghost!”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Ted’s mother said. She frowned at Estelle like she thought she was an idiot. “You probably just heard a car’s brakes screeching outside. Let’s go, Ted.”

They left and Estelle turned to Megan. “I’m sure I heard a scream, and thuds, too. You really didn’t hear anything?”

Megan shrugged and shook her head. “Nada. But if it sounds like you heard someone fall to their death down the stairs….” She trailed off and glanced at the black and white picture of Nathaniel and Alice Tattersall that hung on the wall behind the desk amid other photos of the castle’s history.

Estelle pressed her hand to her mouth. “Could it really have been a ghost?”

“I dunno, but I’m clocking out for the night so it’s officially not my problem.”

Fifteen minutes later, Estelle was in the basement. The basement, which had once housed a swimming pool, wine cellar, a bowling alley, and endless rooms for storage, was now home to a cafe, a gift shop, and staff offices. Estelle stood in the doorway of Mr. Drake Dropwart, the manager and her boss, and knocked. He always left his door open, claiming it was because he wanted to be able to hear what was going on in the hallways and remain open to his employees. Estelle wondered if the castle tradition of never being alone within its walls was a factor as well.

“What is it?” Mr. Dropwart said. He was in the process of gathering up his belongings to head home for the night as well.

Estelle cautiously entered her boss’ office. Mr. Dropwart was a fair man, but he was also very serious and more than a little intimidating. “Um, hello Mr. Dropwart. Do you have time to talk for a couple of minutes?”

“I can spare a minute. What do you need?”

“Well, it’s just, I heard something weird earlier.”

He paused and looked at her sharply. “Is this ‘possibly a leaking pipe in the walls we need to call a plumber about’ weird, or… the other kind?”

Dropwart never talked about the castle’s alleged haunting. He seemed to think the stories were childish and not worth discussing on the clock, and she worried that his opinion of her would drop if she brought it up. If she didn’t, though, she knew she’d never stop wondering about this. “I was on the third floor, and I heard a scream and a crash. A little boy I was with heard it, too. It sounded like someone falling down the stairs, but when we came back down, the people waiting in the entry hall said they hadn’t heard anything.”

Dropwart was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “So, you’ve heard Alice’s last moments. Don’t worry; you aren’t in any danger.”

“Um… is that… something other people have heard?”

He hesitated again. “I’ve been working here for almost thirty years. I’ve heard… things.”

It was clear he wasn’t going to elaborate. “Do you think it’s worth it to have, um, ghost hunters come to the castle to check it out?”

“They’ve come before, though the last was about ten years ago. Most teams in the area have blacklisted the house since the last investigator disappeared here.”

“Yes, I heard about that. But assuming any were willing to come, would it be ok to invite them?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “You want to call them in?”

Estelle almost balked under his expression, but the memory of the scream pushed her on. She had always taken the ghost stories with a heavy grain of salt, but suddenly they didn’t seem so implausible anymore. If she was going to keep working here for the next three and a half years of her degree, she would feel much more comfortable if she knew more about what was going on in the castle. “I think I would feel better if we did.”

Dropwart sighed. “I think that can be arranged. Let me know if you find a team willing to do it and we can set up a few nights on the weekend that they can work. ”

“Yes! Thank you!”

“I want any sort of investigating done by April. We open for summer hours and everything gets a lot busier.”

“Understood. Thank you again!”

* * *

On Monday evening, Estelle straightened a set of antique books on a table in the library. It was just about five, and she was ready for her shift to end and go home. After ensuring everything in the library was in order, she exited back to the main hall just in time to hear one of her coworkers talk to a guest.

“I’m sorry, the castle is actually just about to close. We’re open tomorrow from 10:30 until 5.”

The guest in question was a young man wearing jeans and a polo shirt with a younger boy in tow. “Yes, sorry, I was actually looking to meet someone here. Is Estelle Heurassein here? I was told I could meet with her just after closing.”

Estelle hurried across the huge front hall, her low heels clicking on the shiny wooden floors. “Oh! That’s me! Yes, hello!” She stopped when she reached the desk. “Sorry, Megan! I forgot to tell you I was expecting someone.”

“Oh, ok.” Megan stood behind the front desk. “I want to get closed up, though, so can you talk to your friend outside?”

“Of course. Follow me, please.” She led her two guests through the heavy oak doors to the stone portico outside. “Sorry about that. You’re Flynn Scifo, right?”

“That’s right.” He gave her a firm handshake and then gestured to the younger boy. “This is Karol, who’s also part of Brave Vesperia.”

“Hi! It’s nice to meet you both! My name is Estelle.” She smiled brightly and added, “Though, I guess you already know that.” She was the one who had emailed them, after all. “Let’s walk a bit. There’s a nice place to sit down around the terrace at the back.”

As they started walking, Flynn asked, “Stories about Zaphias Castle being haunted are almost as old as the castle itself. “Did anything specific happen to make you contact us?”

She led them down a stone path that ran along the side of the mansion toward the back terrace. “Last week… something weird happened.” As calmly as she could she described the scream and the thuds. She looked to Flynn with apprehension, waiting to be told she’d probably imagined it.

Flynn, though, looked thoughtful. Even if Brave Vesperia couldn’t tell her anything about the haunting at Zaphias Castle, contacting them would at least be worthwhile for the experience of telling someone her story and being believed.

They reached the back terrace, a wide paved area surrounded by flower beds which were beautiful in the summer months, but in late February were mostly brown and speckled with bits of white that had survived since the last snowfall. At the back, a stone balustrade cut off access to the short, steep hill behind the castle that ran down to the river. Signs were evenly spaced along the balustrade showing a big crossed-out circle around a person climbing over it and warnings of danger, no swimming, and fast currents. Estelle led them to a bench of cold concrete set against the wall of the castle.

“So you heard someone falling down the stairs,” Flynn said slowly once they were seated. “Even though no one had.”

“Yes. Do you know the history of the castle?”

Flynn shrugged. “In general. Built in the late 19th century by a wealthy businessman, donated to the city council after the last heir died in the 50s.”

Estelle nodded along and held off the urge to jump in with all the details. She’d given the story of the castle three times today on tours, which helped restrain her need to babble. She rested her hands on her knees and took a deep breath of brisk air and forced herself to explain the next bit as calmly and rationally as she could. “In 1919, the lady of the house - Mrs. Alice Tattersall - fell to her death down those stairs. People say that her ghost still haunts the place. Some claim to have seen her, though I haven’t before. But I think I now may have heard her.”

“Interesting,” Flynn said. “What other phenomena are reported here?”

“Well… there’s been a lot over the last century, really.” Estelle revelled in being specifically asked for a history dump and launched into the list of paranormal phenomena that had been reported over the years. Karol listened to the list with a lot less skepticism than she’d seen on the faces of her tour guests Friday night, although Flynn looked more analytical than awed. “The biggest thing, though, are the disappearances. The earliest missing person cases date back to when it was still a family home. Over a fifteen year period, five different maids are confirmed to have gone missing.”

Estelle leaned forward as she got into the details. This was the part of the story school groups always paid attention to, even if they’d been ignoring her for the entire tour up until then. “And those are just the ones we have record of! Looking through employment records or personal letters, some historians point to various staff members that vanish from the records without comment, or ‘went to visit relatives’ and never came back. Almost a dozen people could possibly have vanished within the house. After it was turned over to the city and became a museum, there have been four disappearances in the last sixty years. There was a janitor who was working overnight, and then a staff member who stayed late to tidy things up. It was after her disappearance that it became a tradition to never go anywhere in the house alone, and then there were no more staff disappearances. A teenager who was visiting and snuck away from the group back in the eighties was never found, though. And then about ten years ago, a paranormal investigator who came to the house alone disappeared. Maybe you’ve heard of her in your field? Her name was Anya Lowell?”

Estelle wasn’t sure what the look between Karol and Flynn meant, but they seemed uneasy.

“Yes,” Flynn replied slowly. “We do know about Ms. Lowell. She’s the reason you had to go out of your way to ask us to come, really. The paranormal community has essentially blacklisted Zaphias Castle, claiming it’s too dangerous.”

“I understand.” Estelle reigned in the excitement she got whenever she went over the castle’s mysterious past. From the looks on Flynn and Karol’s faces, Anya Lowell must have been well-known or respected by them. “So… will you take the job?” She looked at them hopefully.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer right now,” Flynn said. “Sorry. Back in December, one of our team members was badly hurt during an investigation and we haven’t gone out since then. We’ve been waiting for him to recover.”

“Oh, gosh.” Estelle put a hand to her lips. “Is he ok? What happened?” She leaned forward, eyes intense. “Was it a ghost?”

Flynn shook his head. “No, nothing like that. We were in His Majesty’s Theatre downtown. It’s an old building, and a catwalk he was on collapsed. It was a bad fall, but last I heard, he’s recovering well.”

“Do you think he’s recovered enough to join an investigation right now?” Estelle asked.

“Uh….” Flynn shifted his weight and mumbled, “I haven’t actually… Karol, you’ve seen him recently, haven’t you?”

Estelle was curious about Flynn’s sudden discomfort, but Karol spoke up before she could wonder too much about it.

“Yeah!” Karol beamed. “I saw him last weekend. He’s been out of the hospital for over a month now and we talked about going back to the field soon. He might be ready, especially for this case.”

Estelle tilted her head. “Especially this one? What do you mean?”

Karol’s happy expression turned to a split second of panic and then he quickly laughed it off. “O-oh, I just mean, he’s always been really, um, interested in Zaphias Castle. Ask him about it yourself! If he’s able to come out, I mean.”

When neither of them explained further, Estelle said, “Um… ok. Well, I’d like to tell you to take all the time you need, but my boss said if ghost hunters are coming, they need to be done by the start of April.”

“I understand. We’ll discuss it and get back to you.”

“Thank you. Oh, but I have one more request.” Estelle bit her lip, wondering if she should go through with asking. Flynn looked at her expectantly, so she went for it. “If you do decide to do an investigation here… can I come with you?” Before Flynn could finish opening his mouth to object, she hurried on. “I know the history of the house inside and out, and I know my way around all the rooms and the secret passages, so I’m sure I could be helpful even if you just needed someone to carry equipment and be quiet!”

Karol grinned. “We’ll have to ask the others, but I bet they wouldn’t mind.”

“Yay! I really hope you’re able to do the investigation!”

The idea that she would get to join a ghost hunt put Estelle in good spirits. She said goodbye to Karol and Flynn at the entrance of the house and then turned to stare up at its facade. Her excitement slipped into worry. After what she had heard on Friday, she no longer had any doubt it was haunted. The question was just whether it was the benevolent ghost of the poor woman who fell down the stairs, or something much more sinister - something that could cause a dozen people to vanish into thin air, for example.

Estelle shivered and returned inside to get changed. As long as they followed the staff guideline of never going anywhere alone, she was sure it would be fine.

* * *

A short vibration from Yuri’s phone jarred him out of his nap. Yuri slapped the nightstand a few times before finding it and swiped to see a text from Judith.

On our way. See you soon.

He blinked and checked the time. Damn, it was almost four; he hadn’t meant to sleep that long. It turned out that recovering from a near-death accident sapped lot of energy.

Yuri balanced the phone on his left arm’s cast and then sent a quick, K. Then he laid on his back and stared at the ceiling as he resigned himself to making the journey all the way down to the basement.

He ought to be grateful, he thought as he forced himself upright and sat on the edge of the bed. He was lucky to be alive. He’d visited more than enough doctors in the past couple of months, all of whom assured him he was very lucky to have survived that fall. Yuri thought the real luck would have been to not be standing on a catwalk when it decided to collapse, but he’d take what he could get.

It’s good that I can even stand up, he thought as pain rushed down his spine from the effort of standing. When he’d been lying paralyzed in a hospital bed, getting to this point hadn’t been a sure bet. He rested his hand on the nightstand to stabilize himself and took a breath before taking a step. It was bad luck to have fallen at all, but good luck that slamming onto the stage had bruised his spinal cord, not torn it. He was lucky because he’d been able to see a top-rated physical therapist, without whom he would probably still be using a cane now. Really, his situation was fine. Better than could be expected. He had nothing to complain about.

When he reached the doorway and saw the stairs heading down to the living room, he leaned against the door frame and caught his breath. God damn stairs. He could do it, but it would hurt. A month and a half ago, his doctor had said he could be released from the hospital only if he had somewhere to go where he wouldn’t be living alone. Considering he’d been desperate to get out of there and been warned that even if he waited, there was a chance he would struggle to live independently for at least the rest of the year, Yuri had agreed. So, despite the fact that he’d hoped to never go back after finally moving out, he’d returned to his childhood home like a dog limping up the front porch with its tail between its legs.

Surely, though, the benefits of living with someone who could carry things, prepare food, drive him to appointments, and in general ensure he didn’t fall and die alone, were outweighed by being stuck in a house that only had bedrooms on the second floor and in the basement. At least the apartment he’d given up had an elevator. He moved to the stairs, gripped the railing, and started down.

“Yuri?”

He stopped when his stepfather appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking up with concern.

“Do you need help getting down?”

“I’m fine.” And then there was him. The worst part of this injury, next to the horrible pain, was that he was once again stuck living with the bastard his mom had married. All of his teen years had been spent fantasizing about getting out of this damn house and away from his damn stepfather, but here he was, living under his roof once again, dealing with his bullshit day in and day out.

Alexei Dinoia looked like he didn’t believe Yuri, but didn’t push it. “Are you friends still coming over today?”

“Yeah. They’ll be here soon.” Yuri started down the stairs to prove that he could. He clutched the railing and each step was stiff and sore, but he could do it.

“You can use the main living room. Don’t go all the way down to the basement if you can help it.”

“Oh… thanks.” This was the first meeting of Brave Vesperia since his injury, and he’d been dreading the extra flight of stairs required to use the basement. It had been their go-to hang out spot when he was younger, because Alexei objected to teenage boys playing video games and rough-housing in his nice living room on the main floor with its shiny glass coffee table and fragile decor.

After Yuri reached the ground , Alexei asked, “Which friends are coming?”

“Judy, Karol, Rita, Raven… Flynn.” Yuri hoped Alexei didn’t ask about his hesitation around Flynn. He was barely comfortable thinking about it himself. He missed being as comfortable around Flynn as he was with himself, but this rift wasn’t his fault.

“Ah. The whole gang.” Alexei restrained the exhausted sigh, but only just. “Should I assume this is about your… ghost hunting club?”

Yuri gripped the railing and looked Alexei in the eye. “Yeah, that’s right. We have a case to discuss.” Yuri didn’t know anything about the prospective case, but when Karol told him they’d met with a prospective client and asked if Yuri was willing to discuss going back into the field, Yuri had jumped at the chance to get out of the house.

“I would have thought that even if your mother’s example wasn’t enough to convince you of the foolishness of this hobby, your recent trip to the emergency room would have done the trick.”

Fury flashed through like a lightning bolt, but years of dealing with this made it vanish just as fast. “This has nothing to do with Mom. I might have had that same accident if I’d gone into acting.” Yuri vaguely remembered waking up in the hospital and rambling something about a ghost trying to kill him, but once he’d come down off the drugs, the past settled into clarity. He’d been walking on the catwalk when the structure failed thanks to it being almost a hundred years old. It was his bad luck that his neck got caught in a loop of cord that dangled over the catwalk, strangling him briefly before he slipped free and fell to the stage. Between the asphyxiation and hitting his head in the fall, his brain had thrown together a nightmare about a ghost strangling him and saw patterns in an old building’s electrical failures. The most frightening thing in the old theatre was the lack of compliance with safety codes.

“Your mother died running around after make-believe ghosts. Do you really think she’d want you to do the same?”

It was even harder this time to control his anger. “I told you to leave Mom out of it.” He stepped around Alexei to head for the living room. He wished he could storm off more aggressively, but a pained limp was about all he could do.

Alexei gave him an exhausted look, shook his head, and said, “I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.”

Once he was alone, Yuri leaned back on the couch and fumed. Every time he had a conversation with Alexei, his blood pressure rose. Maybe it was because he’d been very young and not fully aware of how much his mom struggled, but his childhood of just the two of them seemed idyllic. He had memories of a tiny apartment, of her reading aloud to him as he watched clothes spin an a laundromat, or of cuddling together on a threadbare couch. There had never been a father, not since before he was born according to Mom. He remembered being jealous of the kids at school who came back from the summer with stories of exotic vacations, and the little gifts he got for Hanukkah were never as exciting or in-demand as what his classmates showed off after Christmas, but it wasn’t a bad childhood.

Then his mom had been swept off her feet by the charming chief of police who bumped into her while she was working at a charity ball and nothing was the same again. At eight years old, he’d left their cramped apartment for this enormous house. Suddenly they were rich and his new stepfather was… ok. But even though Mom had been a supernatural enthusiast since she was a teen, and even though she’d left him at Flynn’s house overnights to go on ghost hunts since he was too young to remember, Yuri couldn’t help but feel that maybe if they’d never left that cozy little apartment, it could still be just the two of them, living simply but happily.

A text message forced Yuri to stop daydreaming about a past where Mom called in sick the night she met Alexei and somehow that resulted in her still being alive.

It was from Judith again: We’re here!

Yuri texted back: The door is open. Let yourselves in. Don’t go downstairs; I’m in the living room.

A minute later, a gaggle of friends poured into the living room. Rita and Karol were mid-argument about something on Youtube when they reached him and stopped to say hello.

As Rita, Karol, and Judith made themselves comfortable on the leather couches, Karol looked around the room and over his shoulder. In a low voice, he asked, “Does Alexei know we’re in the nice living room?”

Yuri straightened up. “Yeah, it’s fine. He said to use it.”

“Well… ok, then.” Karol took the cushion beside Yuri.

The only person not talking was Flynn, who came in the back, met Yuri’s eyes briefly, and then looked away as he took the armchair on the opposite side of the coffee table.

“I’m so glad we can finally all get together again!” Karol said. “How are you feeling, Yuri?”

“Don’t worry about me. Really, I’m at a point now where I’m just waiting to get this damn cast off.” He gently knocked on his arm through the sling. His broken ribs had since healed, but after his ulna shattered in half and made a bid for freedom by ramming itself through his skin, getting his arm back in working order had been a bit more involved. Yuri didn’t know exactly how many bits of metal had been implanted in his arm to force it straight, but he figured he qualified as at least partially cyborg now. “Now, tell me about this case you mentioned.”

“Yeah,” Rita said. “He and Flynn haven’t told us a thing. Tell us what’s up.”

Karol glanced at Flynn, and then looked at Yuri when he spoke. “Well… it’s, uh, it’s Zaphias Castle.”

Yuri looked at a decorative glass vase on the coffee table while everyone else stared at him. “Oh, yeah?”

“A girl who works there called us because she heard a ghost the other day. At least, thinks she heard a ghost. She got permission from the management to contact paranormal investigators.”

Yuri struggled to think of something to say because obviously everyone was waiting for him to react. What was he supposed to say? ‘Oh, hey, isn’t that the place where my mom died ten years ago?’ It wasn’t like everyone in the room wasn’t thinking exactly that already. He decided to pretend the topic didn’t make his heart feel funny. “The castle’s a big place. Did she say she if she wants us to focus on any particular area?”

Usually Flynn was responsible for communicating with clients and reporting back to the team, but he’d apparently decided he wasn’t welcome to speak today. This was good, because Yuri didn’t want to deal with him today. So it was Karol who said, “Nothing in particular. She’d like any answers about what’s causing the hauntings, and if there’s anything more to the… disappearances.”

“The disappearances are the least mysterious part.” Yuri rested his arm on the back of the couch and pretended to be casual. “The police already answered that one. The river is deeper and faster than it looks from the surface, and the rocks are surprisingly slippery with algae. Really, it’s surprising more people haven’t drowned there over the years, especially before they put up all those warning signs.”

“We don’t need to investigate the disappearances,” Judith said gently. “Other reports from the castle, like the strange noises and spectral visions, aren’t as soundly explained.”

Rita and Flynn were on the same page as Yuri when it came to ghosts: there were none. Their entire reason for going to alleged hauntings was to find out what was really going on and fix them. On the other hand, Karol, Judith, and Raven were believers. Some of their cases didn’t have obvious rational explanations, and those were the ones where half the team said they just hadn’t gotten enough data to figure it out while the other half said it was a legitimate paranormal event. There had been a few nasty arguments when they first started out, but by now they had reached stable peace and had an understanding to respect each other’s beliefs.

That understanding was essential if the topic of Zaphias Castle ever came up. Judith, Raven, and Karol were convinced the place was actually haunted, while Yuri was ready to punch anyone in the face who suggested aloud that an evil ghost had killed his mother. She’d gone ghost hunting alone, decided to go down to the river on the property, slipped in, and drowned. Sitting on his bed in the following days and trying to process that she was really, truly gone forever felt more harshly grounded in reality than anything Yuri had ever experienced. It was like all the layers of life that humans created to separate themselves from the void - love, hope, laughter, music, comfort - had been stripped away and left him with nothing but the raw bones of existence: there was life, and then it was gone. There was nothing supernatural about that. There was no such thing as ghosts. The worst day of his life had not been caused by some magical nonsense, and fuck you for suggesting it.

Yuri had never visited Zaphias Castle. Alexei had offered to take him when he was twelve, saying something about ‘closure’, but Yuri rejected it. All going there would do was rip open a wound he’d tried very hard to close. Now, though… it had been ten years. People still passed around stories about the ‘haunted’ castle, and his mom’s name still got passed around alongside the other people who had fallen victim to the perilous river like she was part of some grand paranormal mystery. Going to the castle made him feel uneasy, but this could be his chance to prove that there was nothing supernatural in that old building. Maybe then people would shut up about the ‘disappearances’ and let his mom rest in peace.

After all of this rushed through his head, what he actually said was, “Could be interesting to check out, at least. When would we be going?”

“Soon,” Karol said. “We have to be done by April, when they switch to summer hours.”

Yuri nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “So we should get started as soon as possible, then.” He’d planned not to start going on cases again until he at least got the cast off his arm in a couple of weeks. March started later this week, and they needed to be out by April. Usually a case didn’t take more than a few days, but there was always the chance that they’d want to take time off between nights to do some research or compile data.

Flynn spoke up for the first time. “I know this is rushing you. We can ask about waiting until summer is over to start.”

Yuri glanced at him, but looked toward Judy and Raven when he answered. “Who knows if the manager will be feeling generous with permission in October? This might be out only shot to get in there. I say we take the case.”

“Are you sure?” Rita asked. “I don’t want to be stuck dragging your ass down the stairs if you collapse on us.”

“Thanks for the concern, Rita. And yeah, I’m sure. I probably won’t be climbing the tower, but I can handle it.”

Judith smiled at him. “I think all of us are on board with you not climbing to any heights.”

“And,” Yuri added, “don’t talk about it around Alexei. If he finds out I’m investigating at Zaphias Castle, he might actually lock me up.”

“Sounds like we got our next case then.” Raven clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Flynn, get back ta that girl and see if Friday night will work.”

Once that was decided, the visit could shift into a general social one. The last time the whole gang was together was the night of Yuri’s accident. Since then, he’d seen them in ones and twos during visiting hours at the hospital, or occasionally when two or three of them popped by to say hello once he was home. Even though Yuri was awkwardly avoiding eye contact with Flynn, he liked hanging out with the whole group again.

They got up to leave when Rita said she needed to get home for supper. Everyone chorused their farewells and filed out toward Raven’s van. Once they were gone, Yuri turned his attention to the kitchen and started to think about his own supper. He hadn’t done very much cooking since he got out of the hospital. It had only been in the past week or two that he could handle standing upright long enough to consider cooking. Alexei had been bringing him meals to his bedroom to save him the journey downstairs, but since he was already down here he might as well give it a shot.

The front door opened again. “Just me,” Judith said on her way back to the living room. “I forgot my coat.” She grabbed it off the arm of the couch but didn’t turn around again. “By the way, I was wondering: what’s going on between you and Flynn?”

Yuri glanced at the coat she ‘forgot’, even though it was below freezing outside. “What do you mean?”

“Please. I haven’t seen a shoulder that cold since that last time I made a snowman. What happened?”

“It’s nothing,” Yuri muttered, accepting that there was no feasible avenue that lead to Judith accepting everything was fine. “We just… had a bit of a fight, that’s all. We’ve had fights since we were kids. It isn’t a big deal.”

“Yes, I’ve seen you two bicker over which flavour of concentrated salt tastes best in instant ramen. This is isn’t like that.” She thought for a moment and frowned. “Do you blame him for the accident?”

“What? No. Why?” That question had genuinely surprised him, which at least meant Judith believed his denial.

She shrugged. “I thought you might, since he’s the one who put the camera on the catwalk in the first place.”

“I honestly hadn’t even thought about that.” Though now he would, and now he had an extra reason to feel bitter about Flynn.

“Ok, then what? Everything was fine the night at the theatre, and then a week later he was coming up with excuses for why he couldn’t join me on a hospital visit. What happened?”

“Flynn said something stupid and I’m pissed at him about it. Happy?”

Judith looked thoughtful for a moment. “I see… I thought it might be something like that. Do you think this is going to last a while and the team should split up until then, or can you two work together?”

“We can work together just fine. Don’t worry about it.” He didn’t exactly want to work in close proximity to Flynn, but he wasn’t going to let this stupid thing stand between him and this case.

“Alright. I won’t pry anymore. Whatever it is, I hope you’re able to work things out soon. I’d better get going before Rita yells at me.”

“Good luck. You’ve held her up by a few minutes at least.”

“Whoops, gotta run!”

She left, and Yuri went back to thinking about dinner. He pushed himself up from the couch and went to the kitchen, where he swung open the pantry door to see what they had.

He had just decided to make some pasta when Alexei arrived in the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah. I’m making spaghetti.”

“Sit down; I can prepare it for you.”

“I got it.” Yuri started toward the stove, but Alexei cut him off.

“There’s no need for you to strain yourself. You returned home specifically so that I could help you.” He pulled the package of spaghetti out of Yuri’s hand faster than Yuri could tighten his grip.

“Hey-”

“Sit.” He left the spaghetti on the counter to place one hand on Yuri’s shoulder and the other on his elbow before forcibly turning him around. “I’ll cook dinner and, since you’re already down here, you can join me for dinner in the dining room.”

“I can cook just fine for myself,” Yuri grumbled one last time, but he knew it would make no difference.

“Go.”

Yuri returned to the couch and slumped onto the cushions. He’d worked so hard to be able to afford to move out specifically to get away from this shit. Behind him, pots clinked as Alexei prepared to start cooking, but Yuri wasn’t looking forward to dinner very much anymore.


	3. Zaphias Castle

Late Friday afternoon, Flynn emerged from his bedroom and blinked in the bright light of the kitchen. He felt like a deep-sea diver coming up for air after hours of being submersed in a sociology text book.

“Are you hungry?” Sodia asked from the stove where she pushed stir fry around the pan. “I made enough for you.”

Flynn looked to the clock on the microwave. “I can’t. I lost track of time and I need to leave soon. Cup Noodle it is.”

“Oh, right. You have one of your… ghost things tonight, don’t you?”

Sodia wasn’t very good at hiding her disinterest in his hobby, but Flynn didn’t hold it against her. He’d met her in class in their first year and shared an apartment in one of the student residences since second year. Ghost hunting was just something he did for fun on the weekend; it didn’t really matter if she thought it was silly.

“That’s right. We’re going to Zaphias Castle.” He popped the Styrofoam cup into the microwave and watched it spin.

“Oh. That will be an interesting building to explore after hours.” She really was trying her best to be supportive.

“Should be. And I could use a break from studying, anyway.”

Sodia smiled as she gave the pan a stir. “I need to catch up on my studying. Your dedication really is inspiring, you know.”

“Oh, uh… thanks. It’s really not that much.”

“Enough that you deserve the break. Is Yuri going to be there?”

“Why… do you ask?” Flynn concentrated on his spinning dinner rather than look at her.

“Aren’t you two fighting?”

Flynn hadn’t said a word to Sodia about what had happened with Yuri, and he wished he was better at concealing his feelings. “It’s not exactly a fight….”

“Is that so? You came home from the hospital in a horrible mood a few months ago and you haven’t been back since. I figured something was going on between you.”

If Flynn was going to be a successful lawyer some day, he really needed to work on not wearing his heart on his sleeve so much. “It’s just Yuri being stupid. I accidentally pissed him off and he overreacted, kicking me out of the hospital and telling the staff not to let me in to visit. I reached out via text and he ghosted me.”

Sodia frowned and asked the inevitable question. “What did you do to piss him off?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Flynn replied quickly. “The important thing is that he won’t even give me a chance to apologize.”

“Wow. That’s very immature of him.”

Flynn was a little bothered by how quickly Sodia jumped to criticizing Yuri. The two years Yuri had spent attempting university had led to a lot of social nights with both Flynn’s friends present, and Yuri had not made a good impression on Sodia. “He’s going through a lot right now. I’m trying to be understanding, it’s just frustrating.”

“Right.”

The microwave beeped and Flynn grabbed his soup. “Anyway, I have catch the bus. I’ll be back at an unseemly hour; I apologize in advance if I wake you up.”

“Wait - you need a fork!”

Flynn wiggled his foot into a shoe. “They come in a cup so you can drink them.”

Sodia’s mouth was open, but she had nothing to say as he gulped down a mouthful of noodle.

“I need to go catch my bus. Bye!”

The bus was approaching the stop when Flynn arrived. It took about twenty minutes to get to his stop, during which time he finished his noodles and then reviewed the castle’s history page on their website. There were differing opinions in the paranormal community about familiarizing oneself with the history of a location before an investigation. Judith preferred not to know anything about a site because she felt it made her experiences and intuitions more authentic. There was no risk of her subconsciously making something up to match a famous haunting story if she’d never heard the story. Flynn, who believed hauntings were all the result of natural occurrences, liked to know as much as possible so that he arrived already knew what avenues to investigate.

The sun set on his way to the castle. He hopped off the bus near the river and tossed his cup in a trash can on his way up to the castle. The decorative ramparts around the tower were silhouetted against the night sky’s light pollution. The castle sat on a low hill with the river behind and a parking lot at the front. Raven’s old van was the only car still in the lot, and Flynn walked a little faster to the stairs knowing his friends were already waiting for him. Salt crunched under Flynn’s feet as he walked up the narrow concrete stairs leading to the main entrance. At the top of the stairs, he came out on a broad square of flagstones where the rest of his friends were already gathered.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, a little breathless after rushing up the stairs and meeting them in front of the portico.

“It’s fine.” Rita stood next to a duffel bag full of electronic equipment with her hands stuffed in her pockets and a scarf concealing the lower part of her face.

Beside her, Yuri wore a t-shirt and an old jacket only partially zipped up, which bulged outward and had a floppy left arm because he hadn’t bothered fitting it over the cast. He met Flynn’s eyes for a moment when Flynn walked up, but then looked away.

Estelle came running from the curving driveway off to Flynn’s right, which offered a longer but flatter way of getting up from the parking lot. “Sorry! I just got out of class and rushed over here!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Judith said cheerfully. “Flynn only just got here, too.”

Flynn gave her an annoyed look and then turned his attention to Estelle. “We’re both right on time. It’s good to see you again.”

“Yes!” Estelle’s cheeks were flushed from a combination of excitement and cold. “Thank you everyone so much for coming. It’s nice to meet you all!”

Karol took over introductions. “Everyone, this is Estelle. And Estelle, you already know me and Flynn. That’s Rita, who’s our tech specialist. Judith is a psychic medium, and this is Yuri. And that’s Raven, who drives the van.”

“Hey! I contribute more than that!”

“That’s right,” Yuri said. “Sometimes he buys us food.”

Estelle giggled. “You seem like a pretty good team. Um, do I need to pay you upfront? How much is it, anyway?”

“There’s no payment!” Karol announced. He straightened up to be as tall as possible. “Paranormal investigator groups should never ask for money - if they do, they’re probably in it to scam you. We just ask that you’re ok with us posting any videos or write-ups on our Patreon.”

“Of course that’s fine! Well, it’s not really up to me because I don’t own the building… but there aren’t any rules about photography inside the castle except no flash.”

“Great,” Rita said. “Are we all set then? Can we go inside?”

“Yes, follow me.” Estelle led the way up the steps and brought out the key for the front door.

When Flynn entered, his first thought was, no wonder people think this place is haunted. It hadn’t seemed so creepy when he visited during the day, but now that the entry hall was dark, the wooden pillars, deer heads mounted on the wall, and something in the air he couldn’t quite put a finger on creeped him out. Then Estelle turned on the lights, and the feeling dissipated.

“Do you want to start with a tour of the building?” Estelle asked, turning back to the group.

Judith said, “I think that would be a wise place to start. We don’t normally investigate a building so large.”

“Great. Oh! First things first, Yuri, you were injured recently right?”

Yuri, who had unzipped his jacket so the cast in a sling was on full display, said, “I can’t imagine what would give you that idea.”

Estelle balked. “O-oh, I’m sorry, it’s just, Flynn said one person on your team had an accident and-”

“He was,” Flynn said tiredly. “Don’t mind him.”

“Ah…. Anyway, I just wanted to say that there’s an elevator to get between the floors if you need it.”

Flynn had known Yuri for years and knew that accepting accommodations that might mean people had to go out of their way for him was anathema to Yuri, so he understood the long pause and frustration on Yuri’s face before he said, “That would be helpful, actually.”

“Ok, when we move up to the second floor I’ll show you the elevator. I have a key for it. For now, let’s start in the entry hall.”

Brave Vesperia followed Estelle straight out of the entrance and into a two-storey room. The wall in front of them went straight up, with a glass door to the terrace ahead of them and stained glass windows as tall as Flynn further up. Across from that wall, a balcony allowed the second floor landing to overlook the entry hall.

Estelle stood beneath that balcony, next to one of the oak pillars carved with patterns of leaves that held it up. “Have you all been to the castle before, or do you want the background history information?”

Raven looked around the group. “I think most of us have been here at some time or another.”

Everyone else nodded, although Flynn knew Yuri had never been to the castle before. He also knew that Yuri had read as much as was available online about the history of the place as a teenager for his own reasons, though.

“Wonderful, I’ll give the truncated version, then.” Estelle smiled and clasped her hands near her waist as she started her tour. “The castle was built in the Victorian age. It was modernized in 1911, when the original builder’s son inherited it. That was the last time the interior changed significantly until the city took it over. Nathaniel died in 1940, and the castle was inherited by his nephew. The nephew had no interest in living in the place, and after attempting to maintain it for ten years he decided to donate it to the city, and here we are now.”

“How did Nathaniel die?” Karol asked.

“No one… is really sure,” Estelle said hesitantly, obviously unhappy with being unable to answer a question. “In May of 1934, he slipped into a coma for unknown reasons and died a few weeks later.”

Rita looked confused. “He just fell into a coma at random? Couldn’t a doctor say way?”

Estelle shrugged. “We really don’t know. The doctor who attended him said he seemed to be in fine condition for a man in his forties, he just… wouldn’t wake up. It’s always been a bit of a mystery, though not an exciting dramatic one like the people who have vanished into thin air here, so it gets overshadowed and not talked about a lot.”

A wave of awkwardness rippled through the group as they all pointedly didn’t look at Yuri. Flynn wished he knew Estelle well enough that she would understand a hand gesture to shut up about the disappearances. He had already warred with himself over whether he should email her and let her know Yuri’s personal connection to the castle, but decided that if Yuri wanted a stranger to know his family tragedy, it was his decision to make.

Estelle seemed to notice the the sudden discomfort, so moved along. “Um, anyway, follow me this way to the library.”

Because Flynn had done his research before arriving, there wasn’t much Estelle could say that was new to him. She led them through a library with towering mahogany bookcases and then into a dining room artfully set with gleaming silverware and a breakfast room set off behind pillars in what formed the base of the tower. They stopped in the conservatory that stuck out from the side of the building and stood under a dome of stained glass as she explained that sometimes, plants would die overnight for reasons that still eluded and frustrated the gardeners.

They continued on see the kitchen, the scullery, the drawing room, the smoking room, the billiards room, and a handful of storage rooms, sitting rooms, and closets spread across the first floor. Never had the team investigated a place with so many rooms, and Flynn was starting to wonder how they could even feasibly cover the whole place.

Their lost stop on the first floor was the study, “which was used by bother Robert and Nathaniel Tattersall as their primary workplace.” Estelle herded the group into the small, wood-panelled room. A heavy wooden desk sat across from a fireplace, and the wooden floor was covered by a rug of faded green and brown that filled the room from wall to wall. “The study is where we can find the first of the castle’s special quirks - a secret passage!” Estelle lifted a wooden flap in the chair rail to reveal a hidden door handle. The whole panel of wall pushed open to reveal a stairwell running parallel to the wall.

Rita said, “Not very secret if it’s on the tour.”

“No,” Estelle agreed. “It isn’t really secret. Servants used it to move through the house without being seen on the main staircase. Robert Tattersall just like the secret passage aesthetic from real castles and wanted one in his house. The more interesting one I can show you soon; it leads from the master bedroom down to the terrace and we actually didn’t even know about it until restoration work was being done in the eighties.”

“Are there any other secret passages?” Judith asked.

“Nope!” Estelle hesitated, tilted her head and thought, and added, “At least, if there are, they’re still secret to us. Anyway, you guys can take the stairs up here and I’ll show Yuri to the elevator. It’s too small for everyone. This lets out very close to the elevator, so just meet me in the hallway outside, ok?”

Yuri left with Estelle and Rita peeked around the doorway to the stairwell. The lights were on in the house, but the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling in the stairwell didn’t do much to repel the inherent creepiness of a hidden staircase in an allegedly haunted mansion. “Are these stairs even maintained?” Rita said. “With how old this house is, I wouldn’t be surprised if they collapsed as soon as you stepped on them.”

Flynn tried not to smile at her. Neither he nor Yuri believed in ghosts because the concept was irrational, there was no convincing evidence, and if ghosts existed than certainly Yuri’s mom or Flynn’s dad would have come back to see them at least once. Rita, on the other hand, seemed to spend her free time proving that hauntings were fake to assuage her own nerves about the subject.

“The stairs are open for visitors during the day,” Judith said. “I remember using this staircase the last time I was here. It’s perfectly safe.” She stepped around Rita and walked up without a problem.

They rest of the gang followed and emerged from the narrow stairs in a broad, wood-floored hallway. A creak and crunch of metal announced the vintage elevator dot sliding open just around the corner. Yuri stepped into the hallway and gave the group a little wave. “Ah, good, you guys didn’t get lost.”

“The second floor is mostly bedrooms. Down the hallway with the elevator, above the kitchen, are the servants quarters. Come this way and I’ll show you the master bedroom.”

The master bedroom followed the wood-panelled way aesthetic of the rest of the house. They entered through a small entry area before the room expanded into a large square with a broad bay window that presumably looked out over the river and the woods beyond, though at night all they saw were their reflections. A faded red rug lay beneath a a four-poster bed and a tiger-skin rug snarled at them from in front of the mantle.

“This was originally Robert’s bedroom, and then Nathaniel’s,” Estelle explained. “Let me show you where the other secret passage is.” She opened a door near the bed and revealed a small room. The entry area of the room turned out to be caused by a closet built into the wall. Estelle pulled a string on the ceiling to turn on the light in the small space. The narrow room was about three feet wide, with a clothing rail across the ceiling and wooden shelves on the two shorter walls. Flynn moved closer to look inside and saw that it continued beyond the bedroom.

“This door here,” Estelle opened one on the same wall as the bed, revealing a short hallway, “leads to a small sitting room between the master’s bedroom and the lady’s. The closet extends along the wall into the hallway. But it was only during the 80s restoration that we noticed that the closet wall doesn’t quite line up. It’s hard to tell because it’s only a difference of a few feet, and when you’re deep in the closet you don’t have a reference for how far the wall extends on the outside. But, look.” They all clustered in the closet, Rita and Karol edging to the front so they could see. Estelle grabbed one of the wooden brackets holding up a shelf and twisted. The whole thing twisted, revealing that the shelf was actually bolted to the wall and the bracket turned a latch hidden in the wall. She tugged it like a door handle and the whole wall pushed inward, revealing a space that went no further then three feet deeper into the closet. Light from the closet illuminated a wooden staircase so steep it would look at home on a ship.

“Whoa!” Karol edged closer to get a better look. “Where does it go?”

“This leads to a hidden space behind the wall of the fireplace in library below. From there, you can exit into the library right next to the door to the terrace. We think Nathaniel had it put in to facilitate coming and going late at night without being noticed. Perhaps he was having a affair? We don’t really know. Like I said, we only found it in the 80s and there are no written records about it.”

The gleam of excitement in her eyes betrayed just how excited the secret passage made Estelle. Flynn wondered if she was majoring in history, because her passion for the history of the house was obvious with everything she told them.

“But that’s not the only cool secret in this room!” Estelle pulled the door shut and twisted the bracket back into place. She gestured for everyone to leave the closet and followed them out. “Look over here!” She ran to the bed and grabbed the edge of the rug. When she pulled it up, she was smiling widely and said “These strange marks were found on the floor and nobody knows who put them there or why!”

Brave Vesperia crowded around to see that the rug covered a ring of V and O shaped symbols. There were little sets of interlocking circles, lone carets, and some pushed together to look like an M or a W. Each was an inch or two tall, and they arced around the bed before disappearing under the rug.

“They completely encircle the bed,” Estelle explained. “They run along the baseboard against the wall, and continue in a complete circle.”

Flynn knelt and ran his finger over one. The mark seemed to have been carved into the floorboards. “What are they?”

“No one knows,” Estelle said. “Nathaniel had a bit of an interest in the occult, so it’s assumed he carved them there for some reason, but we aren’t sure what they are.”

Raven leaned forward, eyed the marks and then said, “Oh! Oh, I know what they are!”

The whole group looked to him. Yuri said in surprise, “You do?”

“Yeah! They’re witches’ marks.”

Rita raised he eyebrows. “What the heck is a witches’ mark?”

“What, ya’ve never heard of them?” Raven seemed to be riding high on the fact that he knew something Rita didn’t.

She rolled her eyes. “Shut up and explain before we lose interest.”

“Ok, ok, I was gettin’ there. Anyway, they’re witches’ marks - or at least, they look like ‘em. I saw ‘em about five years back, before you kids got inta the business. Some lady had drawn them all around her door and windows ta ‘keep out the witches.’ Those little V- and M-shaped thingies stand for the Virgin Mary, and the circles come together to make a daisy wheel, a real ancient protective mark. They started poppin’ up in Britain in the 16 and 17 hundreds, supposed ta repel witches, demons, ghosts, that sorta thing.”

“Wow!” Estelle stared at him, bug-eyed. “Can you send me any information you have about them? The heritage society would be so interested to learn about this!”

“I’d be happy ta!”

Estelle let the rug fall back down. Judith folded her arms and surveyed it, as if seeing the marks through the rug. “So, someone was clearly trying to protect this bed from supernatural attack. Do you think we can assume Nathaniel is the one who drew them?”

“It’s the logical conclusion,” Rita said. “Estelle said he was into occult stuff, right? He probably got into something that spooked him and wanted to give himself some defense while sleeping.”

Karol scooted closer to Raven as he looked around the room. “Do you think they worked? He did die very mysteriously….”

“He probably had a stroke of some sort,” Flynn said. “It was the 30s. Medical technology wasn’t what it is today. A lot of deaths were written off as unknown causes in the past that today we would be able to identify.” Judith’s expression said she thought he was being dense, but he was used to her staunch belief in the supernatural and she didn’t say anything because she was also used to Flynn being a staunch voice of skepticism.

After the master bedroom, Estelle continued the tour to the lady’s bedroom, a guest suite, and the wing of unadorned servant bedrooms. After thoroughly exploring all the rooms, they split up once again so Estelle and Yuri could take the elevator to the third floor and reunited in yet another long hallway.

“This floor used to be bedrooms, storage rooms, servant quarters…. Now, about a quarter of it was converted into a museum.” Estelle pointed through an open doorway off the hall where a set of old military uniforms hung in glass cases. “It’s dedicated to the regiment Nathaniel fought in during the First World War. None of the stuff in there is original to the house, so I don’t know how relevant it is to hauntings?”

“You never know,” Judith said. “It could be that the haunting here is unrelated to the house, and in fact a ghost from the war came along with his memorabilia.”

Karol rubbed his chin. “What about the disappearances among the staff, though?”

Judith shrugged. “It could be unrelated, though that seems an awful coincidence.”

It didn’t take long to finish the tour of the third floor. Most of these rooms were closed to visitors and weren’t furnished, though Estelle assured them she had a key and could get them in for the investigation. They concluded the tour at the top of the smaller staircase that led down to the second floor hallway.

“That’s the end of my normal tour. There’s also the tower, but there isn’t anything up there but a nice view of the city.” She looked to Yuri apologetically and added, “The only access is a spiral staircase, so I’m afraid it isn’t accessible. Oh, and there’s a basement. When this place was still a home, it had a swimming pool, a wine cellar, and a shooting range. Today, though, that’s where you can find the cafe and the gift shop.”

“Thank you for the tour,” Judith said with a smile and her hands folded behind her back.

“You’re welcome! So, what do you do now?”

“It’s actually pretty boring,” Rita said. “We split up and stake out certain rooms. Then we just sit there and pay attention, to see if anything happens.”

“And usually nothing does,” Yuri added. “Sorry if you were hoping for a proper ghost adventure.”

“Oh….” Estelle seemed disappointed but put a smile back on anyway. “That’s ok. If ghosts were popping up all the time, it wouldn’t be a mystery and there’s be nothing to investigate, right?”

Raven chuckled. “That’s the spirit.”

“What three locations in the house do you think we should focus on first?” Flynn asked Estelle.

Estelle put a finger to her chin and said, “Hm…. Well, I would say around the main staircase, for one. That’s where I heard something, and Alice Tattersall did die there. There have been some reports here on the third floor, so we should probably have at least someone up here. Lastly, the library. There have been a lot of guests over the years complaining that the library is too cold, even on hot summer days with the sun coming through the window.”

“Ok!” Karol said. “Should we split into our normal pairs?”

Before anyone else could agree, Yuri said, “Rita probably wants to set up her equipment in the library to monitor the temperature, right?”

Rita looked up in surprise at the mention. “Uh, yeah, that’s probably most useful to start with.”

“Right, so I’ll stick with Rita down there to avoid the stairs. That ok with everyone?”

“Of course, Yuri,” Judith said with a soft smile and a glance at Flynn that said she knew exactly why he was splitting up their normal pairs.

Flynn wasn’t surprised, but he was disappointed. He and Yuri had always gone off together. Rita was usually with Judith and Raven should be with Karol, but there was admittedly no methodological reason for the pairings. It was just how they worked together best. Flynn had really hoped that they’d default to the old pairs so that he could finally get a conversation with Yuri, but he should have expected this.

“I’ll go with you, Flynn,” Judith said. “Estelle, why don’t you come with us?”

“Sure! Oh, and before we split up, there’s one more thing.” Estelle wore a serious expression as she looked around the room. “Nobody should go anywhere by yourselves in the castle.”

In the wake of her sudden seriousness, Raven joshed, “Sure, though I don’t know if I need someone followin’ me inta the washroom.”

Estelle didn’t laugh. “If you need to go, have someone wait outside. That’s what we do when working here. No one is ever alone in the castle.”

Karol was starting to look scared again, so Flynn tried, “We’ll keep that in mind. I’m sure that as long as we’re sensible, there’s nothing to fear.”

“Just be careful,” Estelle said. “The last paranormal investigator who came here was by herself, and no one ever heard from her again.”

“She died,” Yuri snapped. “As long as we stay away from the river, we’re fine.” Estelle opened her mouth to say something else, but Yuri continued. “Let’s get moving. This house is huge and is going to take forever to fully investigate.”

* * *

Two hours later, Flynn wondered if Estelle was bored of ghost hunting yet. She’d been quite excited to help him and Judith set up on the landing at the top of the stairs. They’d turned all the lights in the castle off, because paranormal phenomena always appeared more often in the dark. Flynn, Yuri, and Rita said this was proof that most of it was a nervous mind playing tricks. Judith, Karol, and Raven said this was proof ghosts didn’t like bright lights. On the landing, they sat on the floor with flashlights, notebooks, a handheld microphone, and a digital thermometer. Usually they had a camera, too, but their third camera had been smashed at the theatre and they still hadn’t replace it.

They tried not to talk very much during a stake-out. Conversation could distract them from something happening. They tried not to move much at all, and if they did, they announced their movement in a soft whisper to make sure any rustles weren’t attributed to ghosts when they reviewed the recordings. At first Estelle had been listening very intently, but Flynn noticed her attention gradually wane. By now, she had joined him and Judith in leaning against the balustrade and staring vacantly at the stairs.

“So….” Estelle’s sudden whisper made Flynn turn his head. “Judith, Karol said you’re a medium, right? What… what exactly does that entail?”

“It means I can communicate with spirits,” Judith said simply.

Estelle gaped at her. “R-really? You can?”

Judith nodded once. “Yes. It’s a gift that’s been in my family for many generations.”

Estelle’s whisper got louder with her excitement. “Why do you do this, then? Why don’t you just talk to the ghosts and ask what’s going on?”

“It isn’t that simple,” Judith explained. “It isn’t that I speak to them, but that I can channel them and give them a way to communicate. It’s very difficult to establish the connection, and sometimes they don’t communicate very clearly.”

Flynn sat silently and let her explain. Judith’s claim to be a psychic medium had been the biggest barrier in them becoming friends when Brave Vesperia started a few years ago. It was one thing to believe in ghosts and another to claim you could contact them and let grieving family members hear from them. After Flynn’s dad died, he’d grown up watching his mother pour more and more money into the pockets of scumbag “psychics” who swore they were contacting his dad for her. When there was hardly any money for food and a phone bill in the hundreds thanks to overpriced “spirit medium” hotlines, Flynn thought he was justified in hating the practice. Flynn had distrusted Judith for months after they first met. He’d only been able to befriend her after realizing that Judith never charged money for a seance, and that she earnestly believed in her abilities. She was naive, but not malicious.

Estelle kept going with her questions. “Can you just, sense a ghostly presence?”

Judith tilted her head back and thought. “Yes… sometimes. It isn’t clear, but if there’s an especially strong concentration of energy in a place, I can usually feel it.”

“Do you feel anything here?”

“Yes. As soon as I walked in here, I could feel the energy churning inside. It’s… hard to decipher.” She frowned and tried to concentrate. “Many overflowing emotions. Anger and fear are the strongest, though. So much fear…. I have a bad feeling that something horrible happened here.”

Estelle gazed at her in awe. “Whoa… why didn’t you say anything before?”

Judith shrugged. “The others don’t like to hear it until we’re finished for the night. They don’t want it to subconsciously influence their findings.”

Estelle leaned around Judith so look at Flynn. “You don’t mind that I asked Judith, do you, Flynn?”

“Ah… no, I’m not bothered.” He kept his voice politely neutral.

Judith smiled and patted Flynn’s knee. “Flynn thinks I’m crazy.”

“I do not think you’re crazy.”

“Oh? So you do believe what I’m feeling?”

Flynn struggled to find a polite answer. “It’s not that I… well…. I believe there are many possible explanations for things.”

“It’s ok, Flynn. I don’t need you to believe me.” She put her arms up and stretched. “Oof. We’ve been sitting for too long. Estelle, can you show me the way to the washroom?”

“Yes. It’s in the basement.” She stood up. “Flynn, come with us.”

“Ah - uh, into the lady’s room?”

“No, you can just wait outside.”

Flynn shook his head. “I’ll be fine waiting here.”

Estelle clutched her hands together and shifted back and forth. “You really shouldn’t be here alone.”

It was silly, but Estelle was legitimately nervous so Flynn sighed. “How about I go check in on Yuri and Rita in the library?”

Downstairs, Judith and Estelle continued down to the basement while Flynn crossed the hall to the library’s open door. Yuri sat at the table in the middle of the room, his face lit up by the soft glow of a laptop. Rita was nowhere to be seen.

“What do you want?” Yuri asked, straightening up.

“I just came to see how things are going. Where’s Rita?” Flynn moved closer to Yuri. His laptop was open to their audio program, switched to a dark grey colour scheme to keep it from being blinding. That also meant that it didn’t do much to light up the room beyond him. Only because his eyes were fully adjusted to the dark could Flynn make out the outline of a marble bust on the mantle behind Yuri.

“She had to go back to the van. Forgot to grab a spare battery for the camera. Shouldn’t you be with Judy and Estelle?”

“They went to the washroom and insisted I not be alone.” Yuri, of course, had disregarded Estelle’s warning as readily as Flynn had. Flynn had to wonder, though, if Yuri was really as comfortable being left alone as he let on. As much as Yuri believed wholeheartedly in the police’s explanation of his mother’s accident at the river, wasn’t there something inherently disconcerting about knowing he was in the same building where his mom had last set foot? Wondering how she’d felt walking around these dark halls in the hours before her death? Flynn’s dad had been hit by a drunk driver while standing at the side of the road making a traffic stop, and even now, thirteen years later, Flynn couldn’t bring himself to drive down that stretch of road.

He wanted to ask Yuri if he was feeling alright. A few months ago he would have, but now Yuri had turned his attention back to a laptop and used every bit of body language he knew to tell Flynn to go away. Flynn hovered over the thought of leaving, but this was the first time he’d been alone with Yuri since the day that started this whole mess, and who knew when Yuri would let this happen again?

“Yuri, we need to talk.”

“Uh, yeah, we really don’t.”

Flynn took a few steps forward. Movement caught his eye, but it was just the shadow of the light fixture swaying minutely above him. “You’ve been avoiding me for weeks. I’ve said I’m sorry and I won’t bring it up again. What else do you want me to do?”

“I’d like you to leave me alone,” Yuri muttered to the laptop, stubbornly not looking at him.

Something inside Flynn snapped. “Would you stop acting like I kicked a dog?! You’re acting like a middle-schooler! I told you I won’t bring it up again, so stop acting like I insulted your family honour!”

Yuri finally looked up. It was the first time he’d met Flynn’s eyes and held them in weeks. “You told me you loved me.”

Flynn stiffened and nodded slowly. “Yes….”

“While I was in the hospital!” Yuri slapped the table. “After I had just woken up from surgery. A doctor had just told me that he didn’t know if I’d ever be able to walk again and then you waltzed in and decided it was Time to Deal with Flynn’s Feelings.”

Flynn tensed at the barb he knew had been brewing in Yuri’s mind for three months. Yuri was right; it hadn’t been an appropriate time nor place to admit his feelings to Yuri. At the same time… Yuri didn’t get it.

Flynn had realized he had a crush on Yuri the same day he realized he was transgender. They had been thirteen, and Flynn had been watching Yuri laugh at a joke a classmate told during lunch. With a sudden rush, Flynn had been forced to acknowledge the crush on his best friend that had been growing in the background of his heart. That had been met with another instinctive thought, full of despair: why do I always have to fall for straight guys? …Wait, what?

Their teen years passed and Flynn never said a thing, not even after Yuri told Flynn he thought he was bi a year after Flynn came out and started presenting masculine. Someday, he told himself, he’d work up the nerve to tell Yuri how he felt. Someday there would be a perfect moment to let it out. There was no rush to tell him; they would be friends forever.

And then suddenly he’d been leaning against the van outside His Majesty’s Theatre, wondering why the walkie-talkie wasn’t working, when he heard a crash. Flynn had run inside, flipped on the backstage light, and felt the floor drop away as blood rushed in his ears. He saw Yuri lying in a heap among shattered wood, blood splattered across the stage, bone jabbing to the sky from his crooked arm. Running to Yuri’s side to see if he was still alive had taken an eternity, during which he couldn’t stop thinking about everything he’d been meaning to tell Yuri and the possibility of never getting that chance. He couldn’t even tell if it was Yuri’s pulse he found, or his own galloping heartbeat throbbing in his fingers.

An ambulance had come, EMTs had told him only that, “He’s still alive,” but given no indication of how permanent they felt that state was, and then the whole group had driven to the hospital in utter silence. Flynn remembered the pattern on the rug in the ER waiting room in perfect detail from how intently he’d stared at it while waiting for news. He couldn’t stop praying to a god he hadn’t earnestly believed in for almost ten years. A montage of what-ifs had flooded his brain as he imagined the life he and Yuri could have had if he’d plucked up the nerve to confess his feelings years ago.

When the doctor had arrived to tell them that Yuri was alive and stable, and that he was now sleeping off the anaesthesia in the post-op ward, Flynn felt as if he’d been given another shot at life. It was almost noon and he hadn’t slept in over a day, but he waited another forty-five minutes until finally a nurse said Yuri was awake and could have one visitor at a time. When Flynn had walked into that room, seen Yuri’s face turn to him and smile, he couldn’t stop himself. For eight years he’d been waiting for a good time to tell Yuri, but someone could die just like that, with no warning or build-up, so what if being here now was his one and only chance before a surgery complication cropped up and took it away again? It wasn’t the optimal moment, but it could be his only moment so Flynn had sat by the bed, rested his hand on Yuri’s uninjured one, and told him how he felt.

Yuri hadn’t taken it well.

“Did it not occur to you that maybe I had enough on my plate?” Yuri’s chair squeaked as he pushed himself up. The screen directly illuminated his broken arm now, as if emphasizing his point. “That maybe I was already thinking about whether I’d be able to keep my job or my apartment and what it would mean if I ended up permanently disabled from this? That lying in a hospital bed literally just after leaving surgery in the ER wasn’t where I wanted to be to hear a love confession?”

“It was poorly timed, I accept that,” Flynn said. “But you could have just told me you didn’t feel the same way and moved on. You didn’t have to kick me out. You didn’t have to tell the hospital not to let me in to visit. You didn’t have to spend three months ignoring every phone call and text I sent you.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry I wasn’t considerate enough of your feelings after I almost died.”

Flynn started to reply, but then he heard a crack. He looked up just in time to see the plaster around the chandelier’s anchor crumble away. All he had time to do was twist away, throw his arms over his head, and brace himself as fifty pounds of metal and crystal crashed down on him.


	4. Restless Spirits

“Flynn!” Yuri started to run to Flynn, and then fell to his knee when his leg gave out. He winced, swore, and limped the rest of the way as footsteps pounded down the stairs.

Flynn lay on his side, arms still wrapped around his head. The silver body of the chandelier was beside him in a sea of shattered crystal. Flynn gingerly lowered his arms when Yuri reached him.

“Are you alright?” Yuri rested on one knee and and put his hand on Flynn’s shoulder. His anger at Flynn had dissipated in a moment. Yuri had a general rule regarding Flynn: if anyone was going to beat his ass, it was going to be him. He might be pissed off, but he didn’t actually want Flynn to get hurt.

“Fine.” Flynn pushed himself upright and took a deep breath. “Ow.”

Karol, Raven, Judith, and Estelle ran into the room, all shouting variations on ‘what happened?!’ Estelle thought to hit the lights and the sudden brightness made Yuri squint. After his eyes adjusted, he noticed blood staining the edges of a tear on Flynn’s sleeve, just past his elbow.

“What made the chandelier fall?” Karol asked.

“I don’t know,” Flynn said. “It just… fell.”

Judith looked around the room. “You had the recorder going, right?”

A stab of fear shot through Yuri, and Flynn’s panicked glance said he felt it, too. Yes, the recorder had been on, which now meant everyone was going to want to listen for ghosts and instead hear Yuri and Flynn’s very personal argument.

“I’ll look over it,” Yuri said quickly.

“By yourself?” Karol asked.

Of course not. They never reviewed evidence alone; it was too subjective. Reluctantly, Yuri said, “Flynn will go through it with me.” It would mean spending another afternoon with Flynn, but at least Flynn already knew the contents of the file.

Karol seemed like he was going to protest, but Raven and Judith both understood the situation. “Sure thing,” Raven said. “You boys let us know if ya hear anythin’ spooky.”

At that moment, Rita re-entered the library and stopped just beyond the doorway. “What the heck is going on?”

“Rita!” Estelle whirled on her. “Where were you? Are you ok?”

“I just went to get some batteries.” She held up the pack as evidence. “What happened to the chandelier?”

As Estelle and the others filled Rita in, Yuri looked to Flynn. “How deep is that cut on your arm?”

Flynn twisted to look and winced. The cut ran a few inches along his outer arm toward his elbow. “I don’t think it’s deep. The frame landed on my side and I think it’s going to leave a nasty bruise, but I’m fine. What about you?”

“What do you mean, me? I’m not the one who got beaned by a chandelier.”

“I saw you fall when you ran to me. Are you ok?”

Yuri absently rubbed his thigh. When he’d first woken up in the hospital, he hadn’t been able to move his legs at all. Now that the swelling in his spine had gone down, it was just a matter of weekly physical therapy to get all his nerves up and running again. Only a few weeks ago, Yuri hadn’t been able to walk without the aid of crutches, and he suddenly realized Flynn didn’t know that. The fact that he’d only stumbled once while running was a huge improvement for him, and it was odd to think that the friend he’d known for most of his life had no idea. “I’m fine. Really. Hey, Estelle?!” After she turned back to them, he asked, “Is there a first aid kit on site anywhere?”

“Yes! There’s one in the staff room in the basement. Does Flynn need it?”

Flynn pressed his hand over the cut, which was bleeding freely now. “I should wash and bandage this.”

“I’ll take you down. Judith, do you want to come with us and then we can go back to our station?”

Judith agreed, and the rest of the team filed out. Yuri was left with Rita, who lurked by the door with her hands in the pouch of her hoodie. Yuri said, “I’ll have you know, neither of us were alone when that happened.”

Rita snorted and came over to give Yuri a hand getting up. “Did it really just fall out of the blue?”

“Far as I can tell. I’m sure someone in the know will look at it tomorrow to see if we’re at fault.”

Rita slid into the chair in front of the laptop and hit the space bar. “It’s been recording all this time.” She scrolled back through the waves as Yuri leaned on the chair behind her. “I assume this huge spike is the actual crash. What’s all this noise leading up to it?”

“Flynn and I talking,” Yuri said quickly before she could hit space and find out herself.

Rita looked up at him in annoyance. “You were having a conversation? How are we supposed to detect any actual suspicious noises if they’re drowned out by you idiots?”

“Hey, don’t look at me. Flynn’s the one who came in and started talking to me.”

“Hm.” Rita grabbed the camera and popped the back open to install the fresh batteries. “And of course the camera was off.” She looked up at the cracked plaster where the chandelier had been and frowned. “It really just fell, just like that?”

“It really did. Don’t tell me you think a ghost dropped it.”

Rita stiffened. “N-no! I don’t. Stop being ridiculous. Didn’t Estelle say the ghost stuff is only supposed to be dangerous if you’re alone? You and Flynn were together, so clearly that’s unrelated to the haunting. If it was really a ghost attacking people who are alone, Raven is the one who’d be heading to the first aid kit.”

Yuri looked down at her. “Raven? Why do you say that?”

Rita tilted her head back to meet his eyes. “’Cause he was by himself.”

Yuri pictured Raven and Karol entering the room together. “He was? I thought he was with Karol.”

“I guess he wandered off. I saw him through the window on the second floor when I was heading back up the stairs.”

Yuri stared at the wall. When had Rita been walking up to the house? Five minutes ago? Raven and Karol had come down together when they heard the crash. They’d talked for a few minutes before Rita arrived, which means they must have at least been on the stairs coming down when Rita was heading back toward the castle. “Are you sure it was Raven you saw?”

“Uh… I assumed it was either him or Flynn, since you were in the library, and now I know Flynn was with you. It was too dark to make out any details, just that it generally looked like a man.”

“Huh.”

“W-what’s with that face?” Rita tried to sound mad, but stuttered into scared.

Yuri left the chair to grab the walkie-talkie. “Hey, old man? You there?”

Raven’s voice came through a second later. “Yo! Any new problems in the library?”

“No, we’re fine. I was just wondering if you had gone down to one of the front rooms on the second floor earlier?”

“Eh? No, why?”

“Just ruling something out.” He put it down and looked to a white-faced Rita. “How sure are you that you saw a person and not a clothes hanger?”

“I-it was probably just a weird shadow.”

“You want to come check it out?”

Estelle had given Yuri the key for the elevator. It was already on the first floor, so the doors opened as soon as Yuri turned the key and hit the button. The criss-cross of metal that formed the door crunched closed and they entered the little box.

Yuri couldn’t explain the sudden flash of terror he felt when the door slid shut. He breathed in deep as his heart clenched and fear rose like bile. For three horrible seconds, terror paralyzed him and he could focus on nothing but the sudden knowledge that death was imminent.

And then it passed. Yuri breathed out deeply as Rita looked at him. “Are you ok?”

“Fine, yeah.” Yuri pulled his phone out and opened the app which detected infrasonic sounds. Low rumblings below the range of human hearing triggered a fear response in humans. He knew of several alleged hauntings involving feelings of dread or seeing shapes in the corner of one’s eye that vanished as soon as investigators fixed old, rumbling pipes. He’d felt it himself in hauntings they’d busted, but never this extreme. The sensations caused by infrasonic vibrations usually snuck up in the back of your mind, or made you feel mildly unsettled without knowing why. They weren’t supposed to smack you in the face with a frying pan of intense terror.

The app showed nothing but typical background buzz. He didn’t feel it anymore, and he hadn’t felt it the first time he used the elevator, so he wasn’t sure what to make of that.

They stopped on the second floor. Rita gave Yuri a funny look as the got out. “Did you feel something in there?”

“Did you?” Yuri asked hopefully.

“No, I’m asking because you were looking for infrasound.”

“It was nothing. Just feeling a little uneasy. Probably just unnerved about heights considering what happened the last time I was off the ground.”

Rita didn’t seem convinced, but she didn’t press it and led him to the bedroom at the front of the house. “I’m sure this is the window I saw a person standing in.”

Yuri flicked the light on. The room had cream walls and a bed with a floral comforter, but no mysterious men. Yuri stopped at the velvet rope keeping him from going further in the room and considered stepping over it. His aching back and weak legs advised against it, so he unclipped one end and let it drop before going to the window. Below, he had a good view of the front walkway and the parking lot below.

“I don’t see anything person shaped in here,” Rita said, following him past the barricade and looking around.

“Maybe this lamp?” Yuri gestured at a floor lamp with a frilly pink shade.

“I… guess?” Rita folded her arms and glared at the lamp, willing it to take human form. “I might have just been seeing things. It was dark.”

“Yeah. Probably a combination of it being dark, you being spooked to begin with, and something casting a weird shadow. Might have been something outside casting a shadow on the window, even.”

“That’s right. Human brains are notorious for trying to see human shapes and faces everywhere. I’m sure this was caused by the same ‘phenomena’ that leads people to see the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese.”

“Right. So let’s get back to the library before we get in trouble for leaving our post.”

* * *

“All done.” Estelle let go of Flynn’s arm. “Do you have any other cuts?”

Flynn tugged his sleeve back to his wrist. “No, I don’t think so.” The cut stung, especially after Estelle cleaned and taped gauze over it, but it wasn’t as bad as the throbbing ache in his side. The chandelier had landed on his ribs and he was sure they were going to be black and blue tomorrow.

“You really didn’t see anything?” Judith stood back with her arms folded beside the table.

Estelle had led them to a small room down the hall from the gift shop that had clearly been decorated much more recently than the rest of the house. It had plaster walls, a heavy plastic folding table, padded office chairs, and a corkboard covered in shift notices, local event announcements, and a reminder for staff to check that all the lights were out before closing for the night. Below that, someone had stuck a thumbtack into a page ripped from a spiral notebook. On the page was a doodle of a bedsheet-style ghost and words written in Sharpie: Don’t get gobbled up by the castle ghost! Remember the buddy system! Flynn made a mental note to make sure Yuri never saw that sign.

Looking back to Judith, he said, “No, I really didn’t. We were just talking, and then it fell.”

“Has that happened before?” Estelle looked between them.

“No,” Judith said. “The is only the second time anyone has been injured on a case. It seems to be our bad luck that it comes immediately after our first time. Are there stories about this happening in the castle in the past?”

Estelle shook her head. “I’ve never heard anything about the house attacking people. All the haunting stories are much more subtle than that.”

Flynn rubbed his aching side. “More reason to believe that it was a coincidence. The supports have probably been wearing away for years and it was just bad timing that I was under it at the time. We’re predisposed to think it was intentional because the house is allegedly haunted, but it could have happened anywhere.”

“I suppose….” Estelle didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Judith, if you’re a medium, could you do a… a séance? And ask the ghost why they attacked Flynn? Or is that just a thing in movies?”

“Mm, no, its a real thing. It’s not that simple, though.” She leaned against the battered old fridge. “It’s difficult to target a specific spirit to communicate with. If there’s more than one spirit in the area, I can’t guarantee that the one I connect with will be the same one that dropped the chandelier on Flynn - assuming that was a spirit.” She nodded at Flynn to acknowledge his viewpoint. “And there’s no way to be certain who exactly you’ve connected with.”

“Is there a way to request a specific spirit to turn up?”

“Yes. If you have an item that person owned, especially one they carried with them frequently, and especially one they carried when they died, it can help target a specific person.”

Estelle leaned forward and pursed her lips. “So… if it was Alice Tattersall who’s haunting this place, we would need to get an item she owned and then try to ask her what she’s doing?”

“Are you sure it’s her?” Judith asked.

“It would make sense, wouldn’t it? We know she died in the building, and people have seen a female spirit. She’s who I heard the other day, I think. Could we use a Ouija board?”

Judith shook her head. “Those don’t work.”

“Really? But what causes the planchette to move, then?”

“It’s the ideomotor response,” Flynn said, glad to have a point in this conversation he could agree with. “When people all place their hands on the planchette, small unconscious movements in the muscles cause it to move.”

Estelle frowned. “If it’s just random movements, why does it spell out answers that make sense?”

“It’s subconscious,” Flynn explained. “When people play with a Ouiji board, they know what it’s supposed to do - and what they want it to do. They push the planchette to do what they subconsciously believe they should. There’s nothing magical about it. In research tests, participants who were blindfolded got garbled nonsense from the Ouiji board because they couldn’t see where the letters were. If their hands were truly being guided by ghosts, the ghosts wouldn’t be hindered by their own blindness.”

“Oh….” Estelle slumped her shoulders. “But Judith, your seances are real, right?”

She shrugged. “I believe they’re real. I don’t do it very often, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because not everything in the spirit realm is friendly, and every time you knock on that door, you risk it being answered by someone you don’t want to mess with. Or something.”

Estelle nodded fearfully. “That makes sense.”

Flynn had seen Judith do a seance once before. They’d tried one last year while investigating a hundred-year-old house downtown. They had spent four weekends thoroughly investigating the house, measuring uneven stairs, replacing faulty latches in doors, and searching for raccoons in the attic. They’d dug into the house’s history at city hall and found that it had a long history of residents moving in and selling it very soon after. They’d suggested researching sleep paralysis to the woman who claimed to have seen a menacing figure standing over her bed one night. They had been ready to mark that case down as one they hadn’t been able to fully explain, given the homeowners the best advice they could, and decided to move on.

Then the owner had called them back in a panic and shown them the words ‘help me’ scratched on the living room wall. Flynn was still convinced she had done it herself, disappointed that her bid to become the next Amittyville hadn’t paid off, but Judith decided to try to contact whatever as in the house to see if she could help.

Yuri had stepped out, saying he wanted nothing to do with it, but Flynn had participated out of politeness. He’d seen candles flicker, felt the room grow chill, and Judith had muttered something about being confused, lost, and not sure how to leave. There had been nothing that hadn’t seemed to Flynn to clearly be the result of poor insulation letting in a draft. He trusted Judith and didn’t think she was purposefully lying to them, but he also thought that if someone believed whole-heartedly that they had supernatural powers, an idea popping up in their head in the thick of the moment could easily be interpreted as being placed there by someone else.

“We should head back to the stairs.” Judith checked the time on her phone. “We don’t want to miss any ghostly screaming. It’s almost 11:45.”

“Does the time matter?” Estelle asked.

“The hours between twelve and four are traditionally the most active,” Judith said. “Three to four in the morning in particular is traditionally the ‘witching hour’.”

“That’s mostly a Christian thing,” Flynn said. “The hour between midnight and one is also allegedly very supernatural. Certain occult rituals would only be performed at the stroke of midnight on a dark and stormy night.”

“Wow… you two really know your stuff,” Estelle said.

“Ah… well, I’ve just researched this a lot.” Flynn rubbed his neck. “Yuri’s mom was into all this stuff, and she used to tell us stories when we were kids. Judith is right, though, we should get back.” He rubbed his sore arm as he stood and then pushed open the door to the hallway. He was about to step out when Judith grabbed his arm.

“Look.”

He followed her finger to the concrete floor. At first he didn’t see what she was pointing at, and then he noticed the damp patches leading away from the door to the swimming pool. At first, Flynn thought he was looking at a couple splotches of drying water, until he recognize the regular size and spacing: footprints.

Estelle popped up beside him. “Th-those weren’t there when we came in here.”

“No….” Judith lowered her gaze and added, “Look.”

The prints started at the door to the pool, came down the hall, and then veered off to come straight to their door. The two prints standing before the door were darker, more defined, as if someone with damp feet had been standing there for quite some time. The prints then led away, around the corner to the elevator, and disappeared under the elevator door.

“It was standing right there.” Estelle whispered. “As if… it was waiting for us.”

Flynn stared, trying to make sense of this. While Judith took pictures with her phone, he tried to work out a rational explanation. With his throbbing side, all he could think was, what would it have done to me if it was still there when I opened the door?

In a soft voice, Estelle said, “I think we should go back upstairs.”

* * *

Brave Vesperia remained at Zaphias Castle until a little past three in the morning. After packing it in for the night, they piled into Raven’s van and drove home in tired silence. Yuri had anticipated this case to feel different than their normal fare, but he hadn’t been prepared for just perplexing the events would be. He was used to doors opening on their own and shadows in the corner of his eye, but Zaphias Castle had delivered a full investigation’s worth of haunts in a single night.

Where to start? Explaining the figure Rita had seen in the window? Accounting for the water marks that looked like footprints Flynn found in the basement? Figuring out what had triggered his flash of intense fear in the elevator? Proving that the chandelier’s anchor to the ceiling had been faulty to begin with? That was only going into what they themselves had experienced; they still needed to give Estelle an answer about the scream she’d heard and hopefully find explanations for all the other alleged ghost sightings over the years. No wonder Mom had been fascinated by the place enough to go there even on a night when her usual partner had cancelled at the last minute.

Raven made the rounds to drop everyone off at their respective homes. Estelle had protested and insisted she could take the late-night bus home, but lost the argument after the entire rest of the group insisted she accept the ride. Yuri lived the farthest, so after saying goodnight to Karol, he sat in the passenger seat with Raven.

They were quiet as they left Karol’s neighbourhood. After picking up speed on the main road, deserted at this time of night, Yuri said, “You’re convinced the castle is haunted, aren’t you?”

Raven kept his eyes on the road. “Well… I think there’s a good chance it is, yeah.”

Raven had been a ghost hunter for about ten years, as far as Yuri knew. In truth, Raven rarely talked about his past, but Yuri had gleaned the broad strokes from details dropped here and there and from what Alexei had told him. At one time he had been a police officer, high enough ranked that he had worked with Chief of Police Alexei. There had been incident that led to a lot of hospital time and retirement, and then he’d gotten interested in the supernatural. Three years ago, when Yuri had just started considering paranormal investigating after the kid he babysat eagerly suggested it, Alexei had given Yuri Raven’s contact information. At the time, Alexei had assumed Yuri was just interested in learning more about his mother’s life, and Yuri let him believe that right up Alexei confronted him about why he’d been spotted by a cop wandering around a cemetery at midnight.

“So if it is haunted,” Yuri said, giving that ‘if’ a lot of weight, “what would you do about it?”

“Hm… I’d say, best thing ta do? Leave it alone.” He saw Yuri’s surprised look and explained. “That stuff happened ta us while we were there after hours. If chandeliers were droppin’ on guests durin’ the day? That’s different. But if there’s somethin’ dangerous in that building, anythin’ we do ta get rid of it might stir it up and make it worse.”

Yuri thought about this as they pulled into his neighbourhood. “Are you sure you’re not just looking for an excuse to be lazy, old man?”

“Hey! I take this stuff seriously!” Raven whined.

Yuri smirked, but it faded as Raven pulled into his driveway. The porch light was on, and for a second he felt like he was 16 years old, coming home after sneaking out, and realizing Alexei was waiting for him inside. That thought was stupid, because he was twenty-one and could stay out as late as he pleased. Besides, Alexei knew he was going out tonight, so he’d probably just left the light on so that Yuri could see the keyhole when he came in. It was fine. There was no reason for him to tense up as surely as he had in the elevator, as if he expected imminent death as soon as he opened that door.

“You alright, kid?”

“Never better.” He opened the door and slowly lowered himself down. “Thanks for the ride.”

Yuri unlocked the door and stepped quietly inside. He slipped off his shoes and turned his phone on to use as a flashlight rather then flick on the hall lights.

Until the hall lights switched on anyway and Alexei strode forward from the living room. “You’re home rather late.”

The first emotion Yuri felt was terror, and then rational thought kicked in to remind him that he wasn’t a kid anymore, so that the next emotion was anger. “Yeah? I’m an adult. I’ll stay out late if I feel like it.”

Alexei stood between the front door and the stairs, blocking Yuri’s retreat to his bedroom. “Where were you?”

“Hold on, let me plug the address into my phone for you.” Yuri pressed one button and then shrugged. “Damn, got an error message that says ‘none of your fucking business.’”

Alexei raised his hand and Yuri flinched backward. All Alexei did was point at Yuri. “Do not use that sort of language when speaking to me. Now tell me where you were.”

Yuri could see the door to his bedroom at the top of the stairs. Even if he were healthy, though, he doubted he could dart past Alexei and reach it without being stopped. For half a second he wondered if Raven was still outside and if it was worth it to turn around and ask to go back to his place, but Raven was surely gone by now. Besides, Raven lived in a tiny apartment; Yuri would feel awful imposing. Not seeing a way out of this confrontation without providing an answer, he said, “We were checking out an old house on Danforth Avenue.”

Alexei lowered his hand and shook his head slowly. “Do not lie to me, Yuri.”

“It was the truth, now get out of my way - I’m exhausted.”

“I’ll give you one more chance to be honest.”

“Move. I’m going to bed.”

“You were at Zaphias Castle.”

Yuri’s heart skipped a beat. He considered denying it, but his shock had already shown on his face. Instead, he snarled, “Who told you?” His best guess was that someone else’s parents - Karol’s or Rita’s maybe - had told him for some reason.

“Yuri, I am the chief of police. Do you really think I don’t have the resources to find out where a distinctive beat-up van travelled to and parked all night?”

Yuri glared at him. Had he really used actual police resources to keep tabs on him? Traffic cameras, Yuri had to guess. It was a flagrant abuse of power to use those resources for personal requests, but that didn’t actually surprise Yuri. “Yeah, fine, I was at the castle. Last time I checked, grown adults can go where they please.”

“Hm, yes…. And because you’re an adult, I have no obligation to provide you with food or shelter. Or to pay your medical bills. You are living here, under my roof, and you will do as I say.”

“Oh, will I?” Yuri rolled his eyes.

“Do not roll you eyes at me.”

“Don’t treat me like a child.”

“I didn’t have to take you in, you know.” Alexei’s face was cold with menace. “When your mother died, they asked if I was willing to become your guardian or if you should be sent to foster care. Out of the kindness of my heart, and to honour what your mother would have wanted, I offered my home to you. How do you think you would have fared in the foster system? How many foster parents would have tolerated your laziness, your poor behaviour, your academic failure, or your rudeness? You should be grateful that I’ve not only tolerated you but also offered to pay for your university - which you failed out of, making my investment worthless - and to pay for your current medical bills. Instead, you act offended because I dare to be concerned about your health and safety.”

Yuri broiled with anger, but he didn’t know what to say. Was he supposed to argue that he wasn’t a fuck-up? He already knew he was. “I can take care of myself.” It was meant to be defiant, but came out a bit pathetic.

“You clearly cannot if you think romping around a building at midnight is a smart idea when you know your own mother died doing the same thing. You’re not going back to the castle tomorrow, or any other night.”

“I think I am, actually.”

“I am giving you a direct order. Zaphias Castle is dangerous and you are not permitted to be there after dark. If you won’t protect yourself, then I will. You can be angry if you want, but this is for your own good. Now go to bed.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past five minutes.” Yuri wished he could properly storm off, because slowly limping up stairs didn’t have the same impact. In his room, he fell on his bed and glared at the ceiling.

Had that year where he’d had his own apartment really happened? The longer he spent in this house, the more it seemed like a dream. He’d spent two years squirrelling away tip money to save up for first and last month’s rent, and finally gotten out of this house. For a full year, he’d felt like he could breathe freely. Then that stupid catwalk broke and sent him crashing back home to the life he’d tried so hard to escape.

Alexei had paid for everything at the hospital, Yuri’s ongoing physical therapist bills, and paid out the rest of Yuri’s lease so he could break it early and move back home. This was on top of his debt for university - Alexei was right, he hadn’t been able to hack it and dropped out, and now needed to pay Alexei back for those two wasted years of tuition.

Yuri was trapped. He needed money to get out, but any money he earned had to go to Alexei to pay off his debt. He couldn’t even get away with hiding money from tips this time, because now Alexei would be expecting it. That was even assuming he could work, because right now there was no way he could be on his feet for over an hour. How long would it take until his spine fully recovered? Would it ever? He might be relegated to desk work for the rest of his life, which would be fine if he had a damn university degree and any career prospects. But he hadn’t finished school, and didn’t think he could, because it was like Alexei said: he was stupid.

Yuri sighed and pressed his eyes closed. It was almost 5, and Flynn would be here around noon to look through the tape. He needed to get some sleep.


	5. The Ringing of a Bell

Yuri woke up when his door swung open. He blinked and peered at Alexei entering the room with a bagel on a plate and a handful of paper. He set the bagel on Yuri’s nightstand and dropped a pile of brochures on Yuri’s chest. “Get up. It’s past eleven.”

Yuri rubbed his eye. “I didn’t go to sleep until past four.”

“And whose fault is that? Get up. You’re wasting the day.”

Yuri pulled himself up slowly. He rubbed his eyes and then picked up one of the brochures that had hit his cast and slid down to his lap. He saw the crest of the University of Zaphias and cringed. “What’s this?”

“It’s time for you to go back to school. It’s too late to apply for the fall term, but you might be able to start next winter.”

“Yeah, I already tried university. It’s not for me, remember?”

“Because you didn’t apply yourself. You’re going to try again, and this time I won’t give you as much leniency to slack off.”

The thought was terrifying. Last time, he’d still been living at home and constantly hounded by Alexei to study more. That was lenient? He would never have a free minute to himself if Alexei had his way. Sometimes, it was difficult to remember the first couple of years he’d lived here, back when Mom had still been alive. Alexei hadn’t seemed so bad back then. Yuri had even liked him. Had Mom’s death really changed him this much, or had Yuri just been too young to have conflict with him?

“You won’t need to apply for a few more months. Take time to consider your options. I’ll expect a plan from you by the end of March.”

Alexei left, and Yuri crumpled a brochure into a ball. He tossed it at the wall and sighed. So, in one month he was expected to figure out what to do with his life. Not only that, but his plan needed to be acceptable to Alexei. For a moment, Yuri strongly considered walking out and living on the street until he found a way to make money, because at least then he’d have freedom.

After thinking about Alexei-the-jailer, he grabbed his phone and sent a text to Karol: I’m gonna need a fake case to say I’m working on that isn’t the castle. Have anything in the files?

Karol replied a minute later. Does Alexei know about the time we investigated the barn at my aunt and uncle’s place? They’ll cover for you if he calls and asks if we’re there.

Yuri appreciated that Karol didn’t even need to ask what this was about. He replied, Don’t think so. I wasn’t living with him when we did that. Can you send me the info?

Once he retrieved it from Karol, Yuri reluctantly hit Flynn’s name. He cringed as he scrolled through a handful of messages Flynn had sent him in the past few months, all apologizing and begging Yuri to talk to him. The worst part of this whole situation with Flynn was that he knew he was in the wrong. Oh, Flynn had absolutely chosen a horrible time to confess his feelings and Yuri still felt justified at flipping out at him in the moment, but he hadn’t been avoiding Flynn for three months because he was angry at his lack of love confession etiquette.

In truth, Yuri just felt awkward around Flynn. Flynn had been Yuri’s best friend since they were little. Their mothers had been friends and they’d gone to the same synagogue from a young age. Alexei’s house putting Yuri in the same high school district as Flynn had been what Yuri was most excited about when his mom told him she was getting married. Flynn had been his friend for so long, that Yuri’s mental category of ‘friends’ used Flynn as the master copy of what friends should be like. When Flynn told him he loved him, everything had gotten scrambled. It wasn’t just that he had to let Flynn down; he first had to mentally re-orient his entire relationship framework to conceive of Flynn in the ‘potential romantic interest’ category.

And the worst part was, once he had finally reorganized and settled on Flynn in his new category… he wasn’t entirely sure he’d made the right call in rejecting him. He had never been attracted to Flynn when Flynn was still feminine-presenting. Then, after Flynn started taking testosterone, the changes had been so gradual that Yuri, who saw him every day, barely noticed as Flynn became more and more masculine. When Flynn had forced Yuri to consider him in the romance category, Yuri had suddenly realized how much happier Flynn was now. How much more he smiled. How he carried himself with so much confidence and comfort. More than any physical changes, that alone made Flynn so much more attractive now then he’d been as a teen.

Was that attractiveness enough to overcome how much Yuri saw him as a friend? You didn’t have be attracted to every friend who was attractive. Judith was hot, too, but that didn’t mean he wanted to date her. He was happier with Judith as a friend, just like Flynn. At least, that’s what he thought. Every time he saw Flynn, the debate reared up in his mind again, which he really didn’t need right now. He had enough going on with Alexei and his injuries to add romantic drama to the mix, so he’d rather just avoid Flynn entirely so he didn’t have to deal with how confused Flynn made him.

He couldn’t keep avoiding him, though. Today they needed to meet up to review the recording from last night, so he ignored Flynn’s old texts and messaged him for the first time in months.

Hey, what time are you coming by today?

Flynn replied almost immediately. I was thinking around noon?

K. I’m gonna forward some old case docs to you. When you get here, act like we have a new case and tell me about it while Alexei can hear.

Got it. Flynn added a thumbs-up emoji, and like Karol, he didn’t need any extra explanation for what was going on.

* * *

Yuri was eating a sandwich in the dining room when Flynn arrived. He started to get up when he heard the knock at the door, but Alexei got there first.

Yuri stood in the archway between the dining room and foyer as Flynn said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Dinoia.” Flynn stood on the front step in bland khakis and a polo shirt buttoned all the way up that made vanilla look spicy. Yuri wanted to kick himself; this was the look that had his romantic thoughts tied up in knots?

“Good afternoon,” Alexei said. “It’s good to see you again. Yuri didn’t tell me you would be coming.” He gave Yuri an annoyed look.

“Forgot to mention it.” Even though Flynn knew precisely what Yuri’s relationship with Alexei was like, Yuri still didn’t feel comfortable saying, ‘You were too busy berating me for me to tell you anything.’

“I hope it’s not a problem,” Flynn said. “I can come back tomorrow, if you’d rather.”

“No, it’s fine, come in.” After Flynn stepped inside and the door closed behind him, Alexei said, “What have you been up to? You’re still in school, correct?” he gave Yuri a pointed look.

“That’s right, sir. I only have a couple of months left before graduating, and I got my LSAT scores back already. I’m just waiting for acceptance letters now, and I’ll hopefully start law school in the fall.”

“Wonderful,” Alexei said with another look at Yuri. Alexei had been comparing Yuri’s academic achievements to Flynn’s - and finding him wanting - ever since high school. “To which schools are you applying?”

“I’ve applied internally to U Zaphias, and I have a few back ups, but my top choice is Aspio University. It has an excellent law program, and Aspio is still commuting distance from Zaphias so I would be able to stay close to my mom.”

“Aspio! Yes, that’s a wonderful school. In fact, I know the Dean of Admissions there. I would be happy to put in a good word for you.”

Flynn startled at the suggestion and then smiled awkwardly. “Ah, uh, that’s very kind of you to offer, sir, but I would rather be accepted on my own merits.”

“I admire your ethic. I’ll leave you and Yuri alone now.”

“Thank you, sir. Oh, Yuri.” Flynn finally turned to him. “I know this is last minute, but Karol just asked if we could do a last-minute investigation. His uncle thought he saw a ghost in the barn and nearly lost a hand to a shredder, so he asked Karol if his team could take a look right away.”

“What about our current case?” Yuri asked with as much surprise as he could muster.

“Rita, Judith, and Raven will finish up there. We’ll go with Karol to his aunt and uncle’s place. Is that ok?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” He looked to Alexei. “Unless, of course, you want to lodge a complaint with that?”

Alexei sighed, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “If you want to waste your potential on this ridiculous hobby, I won’t stop you.” He walked away to shut himself in his office.

Yuri gave Flynn a relieved look and a grim smile. “Let’s go up to my room.”

They moved up slowly, Flynn dragging his feet so he could walk up beside Yuri and not leave him behind. At the top, when Yuri paused to rest, he asked, “Are you alright?”

“Fine. Wish I had an elevator here, too.”

“It’s, um, it’s good to see you on your feet.”

“Right….”

“Oh, before I forget - my mom wants to know if you’ll be coming to our house for Purim?”

Yuri hesitated with his hand on his doorknob. He’d spent every holiday at Flynn’s house every since his mom died, but now it would just be awkward. “I… have a physical therapy appointment that afternoon. I’m going to be worn out.”

“Oh. Yeah. Of course.”

Yuri led Flynn into his bedroom and dropped into his computer chair. Flynn dragged the armchair in the corner over and handed Yuri a USB key. Yuri fired up their audio program and then stared at the waves. It was strange to think that his conversation with Flynn, so tense and important, was captured here in squiggly lines.

“Let’s isolate the part where we were talking,” Flynn said. “Just before the chandelier fell. We can review everything else just in case later.”

Yuri skimmed through the wave, stopping to hit the space bar every so often to see where in the evening he was. With his left arm in the sling, this involved a lot of back forth from the mouse to the keyboard. He was already frustrated because he still hadn’t gotten used to using a mouse right-handed, and halfway through he pushed away from the desk and said, “You do it.”

With both hands at his disposal, Flynn worked through the file much faster. Yuri appreciated that Flynn hadn’t asked to take over soon, because it must have been killing him to see Yuri work so slowly. This was a fair trade-off, Yuri though, because he’d spent most of his life dying inside whenever he watched Flynn try to navigate a smartphone.

“Here.” Flynn pressed play and Yuri heard his own voice.

“What do you want?”

“Ok,” Yuri said. “Let’s just… listen to the whole thing and see if we notice anything.”

They sat in silence as their argument played out. Neither of them dared look at each other. Yuri kept glancing at the door to make sure it was closed, because he couldn’t imagine the conversation he’d have with Alexei if this was overheard.

They heard the crash and both of them yelling, and then Flynn hit pause. “So… did you notice anything?”

“Nah. Boost the background audio.”

Flynn went to work. Yuri was glad they’d both watched Rita do this often enough that they could do it without her help. Flynn copied the waves into a new file and went to work isolating the vocals, lowering the volume, and then making the noise between their words as loud as possible. “Let’s see if this changes anything….” He hit play again.

This time, they heard a lot of rustling, a lot of fuzz, the distant rumble of a truck, and their tinny voices. It would be smoother if Rita had done it, but this was good enough. Once again, Yuri leaned in to listen close and tried to hear only noises, not actual words. There was a lot of fuzz and then, “There!”

Flynn paused. “You heard something?”

“Go back.”

Flynn scrubbed back and hit play again. Yuri’s voice said, “You told me you loved me!” and then there was a pause before Flynn spoke again.

“Did you hear it?” Yuri asked.

“Hear what?”

“Right after I finish talking, make that background noise louder.”

Flynn did as told. There was nothing visible in the wave because all the background static filled the space. He pressed play again, and this time his eyes lit up. “Oh!”

Three dull thuds could be heard immediately after Yuri finished speaking. Flynn and Yuri exchanged a started look, and then Flynn scrolled back to play it again.

“It sounds like someone banging on the table,” Flynn said.

The knocks were so quiet that they hadn’t heard them until turning the volume up, but they were remarkably intentional in how evenly spaced they were. It sounded as if someone else had been in the room and pounded their fist on the table to punctuate Yuri’s outburst.

“Can you tell where it’s coming from?” Yuri asked.

Flynn shook his head. “It’s too quiet. I feel like it’s thumping on the table because of the slight hollow quality, but I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, could be the floor as far as I can tell. We didn’t drop anything that would bounce and thump, did we?”

“Not that I remember. There’s always the possibility of something going on with the pipes.”

“Yeah… that’s the most likely cause.” It was a bit odd to happen only once, though. If the plumbing was noisy, there would be more bangs throughout the recording, Yuri thought. He didn’t know enough about plumbing to know if three thuds in isolation was normal.

“Let’s… talk it over with the others tonight. See what they say.”

“Talk to Karol at his uncle’s barn, you mean?” Yuri said with a wink.

“Ha. Yes. We’ll see the others tonight at Karol’s uncle’s place.”

* * *

That evening, Karol’s dad picked Yuri up and took him back to the Capel house. Yuri had been there many times before as a babysitter. He’d originally met Karol when the kid was six and Yuri took on a babysitting job on weekday afternoons. Karol was twelve now, but Yuri was still the go-to sitter if his parents needed to be gone overnight.

Raven then picked Yuri and Karol up and took off for Zaphias Castle. Yuri sat in the back with Karol, not willing to give a traffic camera a shot of him in the front passenger seat if Alexei tried to check. When they arrived, Yuri didn’t mention it but appreciated the fact that Raven drove all the way up to the front of the castle, dropped him off, and then drove back down to the parking lot. Estelle, Flynn, Rita, and Judith were already waiting under the portico.

“Hi, Yuri! Hi, Karol!” Estelle said when they arrived.

“Yo. Everyone ready for tonight?”

After general nodding, Flynn said, “I meant to ask - what about the fallen chandelier? Do we need to pay damages for that?”

“Oh! No, no, you’re fine.” Estelle quickly shook her head. “Mr. Dropwart - he’s my boss - reviewed the security camera footage which proves it just fell on its own. He’s more worried about you suing the estate. You’re not going to, are you?”

Flynn raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What? No. I’m fine, really. But wait, there’s security camera footage?”

Yuri had pinged on that, too. Of course a place like this would have security cameras; why hadn’t he thought of that? They probably weren’t as high quality as what they got from their own cameras, but they only had two and the house was huge.

Estelle nodded. “Yes. They aren’t in every room, because the city council doesn’t put enough of a budget into the castle heritage society,” the small scowl on her face showed what she thought of the municipal government’s care for historic sites, “but we have them in the rooms with the most expensive things. The library is one.”

“Can I see those tapes?” Yuri asked.

“Um, sure! I can take you down there. What else is the plan for tonight?”

Rita jumped in first. “I’m going to take temperature and EMP readings in all the rooms. Yuri, I’ll be walking around a lot and heading up to the tower, so you shouldn’t come with me tonight.”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Yuri said. “I’m going with Estelle first to check out the tapes. After that, we can stake out the basement to see if those footprints come back.”

“I’ll go with you, Rita,” Karol said. “You don’t want to be wandering around alone.”

“Then I’ll join Judith,” Raven said with an exaggerated wink. “Y’know, in case ya need a big, strong man around when the ghosts come out.”

“Oh? Hm….” Judith tilted her head and put her finger to her lips. “Flynn, you’d better come with me, then.”

Flynn startled while Raven deflated. “Oh, ah, if you’d like,” Flynn said. “I wanted to take a look at the pipes.”

Flynn had already explained what he and Yuri heard on the recording, so there was no debate once the teams were decided. They walked inside and separated in the main hall. Everyone else headed upstairs, while Yuri followed Estelle to the elevator. He braced himself when he stepped inside, but didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. It was just a rattling little box that took them down to the basement.

“I have a question,” Estelle asked on their way down.

“Shoot.”

“According to people who do believe in ghosts, do things like holy water and crucifixes actually work? If I wore a crucifix necklace, would it protect me from ghosts?”

Yuri raised an eyebrow. “Worried about falling chandeliers?”

“Um… well, I mean, maybe a little?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Ghosts dropping things on your head hardly ever happens.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. What you really need to watch out for are the ghosts who possess little dolls and then try to knife you.” He almost felt guilty at the shock of terror on Estelle’s face.

“Is that really something I should be worried about!?” The elevator reached the basement and Estelle stood in frozen horror for a second before dashing out after Yuri. “Have you seen that?! Are there stories about that?!”

Yuri stopped in the hall and stifled a laugh. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry. That’s just a thing in movies.” Yuri got the impression that Estelle was a little sheltered, and she had probably gone most of her life only tangentially aware of the horror movie scene.

Estelle let out a relieved breath. “Oh, thank goodness.”

After leaving the elevator, they turned away from the main hall with the gift shop and cafe and instead headed down a smaller corridor with doors plastered in ‘Employees Only’ signs.

Not feeling nearly as guilty as he should, Yuri said, “There is one famous case of a doll called Robert, though. Stories say it moved around the house by itself and giggled sometimes.”

“What?!”

“But anyway, as for your original question, I’m actually Jewish so can’t tell you about holy water and crucifixes. I don’t know much about it.”

Estelle gasped. “Oh! I’m sorry for assuming. This is the room, by the way.” Estelle unlocked one of the doors and let Yuri into a small room with old desktop computers sitting on cheap plastic tables. The fluorescent light buzzed when she turned it on.

“All the security cameras are operated from this computer.” Estelle sat on a creaky folding chair and jiggled the mouse to get the screen to turn on. “I really am sorry I assumed about you. I went to Catholic school growing up and I’ve never had friends outside of school, so I’ve never actually had friends outside of that circle.”

“You’re pretty religious, then?”

Estelle gave a long pause. “My parents are.” She said it with a disconcerting smile.

“Do you still live with them?”

“I do. I go to Upper Ilyccia College and it’s only a fifteen minute drive from my house, so it would be silly to live anywhere else.”

It sounded like a canned response. Yuri recognized it easily, because it was exactly what he’d said when he was at U Zaphias and still living with Alexei. Yuri inspected Estelle’s face and wondered if it was just him projecting that he saw in her eyes the same deep desire to get the hell out. “So… what’s your major?”

“Nursing.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s cool.”

“Uh-huh. It wasn’t my first choice, but I enjoy it.”

“What was your first, then?”

Estelle pursed her lips for a second as if she was about to say something embarrassing. “Well… I really wanted to major in English, but there are no careers for English majors so it’s a waste of a degree…. So I took Nursing instead.”

Yuri sighed. “Let me guess: your parents gave you a list of acceptable majors? None of them liberal arts?” Of course they had. Yuri just wondered if her list had been longer or shorter than the one Alexei gave him. After she nodded, he said, “Do what you think is best, but majoring in something because someone else told you to is pretty miserable in my experience.”

“It’s not so bad….” Estelle swivelled to the computer. “Um, anyway, we should look into the security footage like you asked.” She went to the taskbar to open up the file explorer.

Yuri pulled a chair over and raised his eyebrows. “Windows 7. You weren’t kidding about the low budget.”

Estelle pouted as she went through a series of folders. “No one cares about local heritage.”

“Well, the Tattersalls were Gilded Age capitalists who probably took advantage of workers in their steel mills and lived in this luxury castle while poor immigrant servants scrubbed their floors. Given the time, I bet they were antisemitic, too. So maybe it’s not the best part of local heritage to celebrate.”

Estelle’s pout turned to genuine distress and she turned her head to him. “Well-! I mean, yes, you’re right, but… but it’s still….”

Yuri snorted. “Chill out. I don’t care that much. Where are the videos?”

“Right. Um, here’s the one from the library.” She double-clicked and a grainy, black-and-white view of the library opened. The camera seemed to be placed in a corner near the door, so that Flynn’s back was to the viewer as he stood by the table.

“There’s no audio, is there?” Yuri suddenly asked with a stab of panic as Estelle moved the mouse to the play button.

“No, just video, sorry.”

“That’s fine.” Yuri scooted forward to watch the video. He saw his mouth moving, saw Flynn make emphatic hand gestures, and then noticed the chandelier sway slightly. He hit the spacebar. “What was that?”

“What?”

“The chandelier. It moved.”

Estelle moved the player back a few seconds and they watched as the chandelier drifted back and forth as if it had been hit by a sudden breeze. Yuri stared at it for the next minute of video, watching the sway slowly peter out, until without warning it plummeted down on Flynn.

“The swaying might have caused the final weakening of the anchor before it fell,” Estelle said. “But what caused it to sway?”

“Might have been a breeze?” Yuri tried to remember if there had been any open windows. That was usually the first thing they checked for, though, so if was the wind, it was getting into the room through a non-obvious entry. “Can I keep a copy of this video? We might want to look over it later.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s fine.”

“Ok, remind me to get it from you later. Rita has some USB sticks in her bag.”

“Sure. Are there any other videos you want to see?”

Yuri hesitated. There was a video he wanted, which he had been at the back of his mind since Estelle first mentioned security cameras. He knew it was a long shot, but, “Do you still have the videos from the night Anya Lowell disappeared?”

Estelle looked surprised, and then thoughtful. “You know… I think we do, actually.” She turned to the computer and started digging through folders again. “Most files are temporary and are automatically deleted after three days. If there’s an incident, though, they get moved to a different directory. Obviously the security footage is the first thing the police asked for, so they got moved there. The computers haven’t been replaced since then, and no one ever cleans them up, so they should still be in the longterm storage folder. And… here you go!” Estelle beamed as she found a folder named with a date that was scored into Yuri’s heart. “Do you think you’ll see any evidence of ghosts from that night?”

Yuri’s heart skipped a beat. Estelle didn’t know. He couldn’t blame her for taking this lightly. “Nah, I just… want to see it.”

She opened a video showing the main entry hall. “Here’s the first one. Are you very interested in the case?”

Yuri stared at the screen. The video was small, only taking up a few square inches of screen space, but it showed the door open and a woman with long, dark hair standing in the doorway. “Yeah…. She’s my mom.”

Estelle breathed in quickly. “Oh! I - I had no idea… oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry if I said anything-”

“It’s fine.” Yuri held up a hand to cut her off. “I could have said something.” He clicked play.

Yuri didn’t really know what he was expecting. Some tiny part of him had thought that watching this would help him understand exactly how she’d died, but obviously the police had watched as well. If seasoned detectives couldn’t give a better theory than, ‘she probably fell in the river because nothing else makes sense’, he didn’t know what he expected to see. As he watched her enter the building and then look toward the camera, a punch to his gut told him what he’d really wanted to see: her.

Estelle pushed her chair back and waited silently as Yuri clicked through the videos. He considered paying attention to the backgrounds to see if there were any clues about what happened, but got distracted watching her that it slipped his mind. She was just how he remembered her, wearing the soft blue sweater that had rubbed on Yuri’s cheek when he hugged her goodbye that evening. Around her neck was was a dark chain, indistinguishable in this resolution, but Yuri knew it was her Hamsa necklace. Mom used to say that it protected against the evil eye and would keep her safe from harmful spirits while on an investigation. Considering what happened… well, so much for that idea.

The last video Yuri watched took place at around one in the morning based on the timestamp in the corner. Mom was last seen entering the master bedroom, and then she disappeared from the footage and from Yuri’s life. Yuri stopped the video and then stared at the screen. It had been a long time since he had let himself cry about Mom, and he had gotten really good over the years at bottling that shit up. All the tears he wasn’t shedding now condensed into a heavy weight in his chest.

Estelle spoke softly. “The police think she used the secret passage in the closet to get downstairs and then snuck out back through a window, since the library camera has a view of the back door.”

It didn’t make sense. Mom had no reason to go down to the river, and definitely no reason to sneak around, evading cameras. She had permission to be at the castle, same as Yuri’s team did now. What other explanation could there be, though? The security footage showed her entering, but never leaving. Police had searched the whole building up and down for any sign of her. Yuri had no doubt that it had been the most intensive missing person search the city had seen, considering she was the wife of the chief of police.

Yuri clicked the X and pulled his hand away from the mouse. “We should get out of here. We were supposed to watch the hallway for any activity.”

* * *

Flynn was with Judith and Raven in the dining room. They were doing well with the rule about not speaking while recording and passed the time pushing a paper covered in tic-tac-toe games back and forth. Earlier this evening, they had searched the library for what could have caused the thumping noise. Flynn tried dropping various items to see if they made the same sound. Judith had even dropped one of the books as part of the experiment, which had nearly given Flynn a heart attack and he still dreaded getting in trouble for that if the managers looks at the security footage.

Judith’s flagrant disregard for antiques had been fruitless, anyway. The falling books ruffled a lot more in their thuds that the three solid knocks on the tape. The only way Flynn had been able to replicate the sound was by thumping his fist on the table, and this did not reassure him. Tomorrow, he’d try to find a plan of where the water lines were in the castle, and hoped to find a plumbing-related explanation.

The clock in the library struck midnight. Flynn looked up and waited for it to finish, partly to give him an excuse to not put down his last X and give Judith the victory. As the last bong died, Judith picked up the recorder and said softly, “Clock went off in the library.” It would probably be obvious, but they covered all their bases just in case.

That done, Raven grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Twelve o’clock and all’s well.”

Yuri came through first. “We had a slamming door down here.”

Karol burst in next. “W-what? Are you ok?”

“We’re fine!” Estelle’s voice was quieter; obviously she was leaning closer to Yuri to be heard. “It just banged shut down the hall. How are all of you?”

Rita could be heard saying, “Give me that,” and then her voice came through crisp and clear. “There are some temperature anomalies up here, but nothing to worry about.”

“Do you guys want to rotate stations?” Yuri asked.

Judith answered first. “You stay where you are, Yuri. I think we’re fine, though?”

“Yeah,” Rita said. “I haven’t finished surveying all the rooms up here.”

Flynn said, “Very well. We’ll do another check in at one. Yuri, let us know if there are any more slamming doors.”

“You got it.”

After the communication fell silent, Raven folded his arms behind his neck and leaned back in the dining room chair. “Man. After the first night, I was expectin’ things ta get more excitin’.”

Flynn was about to tell Raven off for leaning back in an antique chair, but then he heard a jingle. All three of them froze and looked to the hallway door. Flynn would have thought he’d imagined it if the other two hadn’t also reacted, but now he sat in tense silence as he waited for the house to prove he was jumping over nothing. Then it came again, and now they all looked at each other. It sounded like a small bell ringing.

Flynn picked up their recorder and said slowly, quietly. “That’s… a ringing bell. We don’t know what’s causing it.”

“There are bells in the kitchen,” Judith said. “Let’s go look.”

The bell rang again as they were on their way down the hall. The closer they got to the kitchen, the more sure Flynn was that that was the source. The three of them walked close together down the dark hallway. The beam from his flashlight gleamed on the wooden floorboards. The next time the bell rang, the light bounced as Raven startled.

At the kitchen door, Flynn held his breath and listened to the jingling just beyond the door. It was such a soft, pure jingle that if he’d heard it in December, he’d assume it was meant to be festive.

“Go on,” Raven whispered. “Open it.”

Flynn let out his breath and pushed the door open. The kitchen was empty. The closest it came to hosting something alive was the bowl of plastic fruit that sat on the marble-topped island. The jingle of a bell made him turn to the wall by the door, where a row of brass bells in a gradient of sizes hung from the wall.

“That’s a service bell,” Raven said in a hoarse whisper. “There’s buttons ta activate ‘em throughout the house. Each bell is for a different room - the little plaque up there says that one is for the study. Ring a bell ta summon a servant, see?”

The same bell rang again, moving on its own right before Flynn’s eyes. His mind raced to explain it. They were connected to a system of wires in the walls, right? Tug on a wire, make the bell ring. A rat in the walls having a nice chew could make the bell go off. The explanation made sense, but his heart still filled with cold dread when it rang again.

Judith folded her arms. “Well… why don’t we go to the study and see what they want?”

“I dunno how I feel about runnin’ ta the beck and call of a ghost.”

“Judith is right.” Flynn tore his eyes away from the bell. “Something in the study might be causing the bell to get pushed. We need to find out what.”

The bell rang again as they left the kitchen and headed back down the hall. Flynn stopped himself from running because there was nothing to panic about. Instead, he walked with intent very quickly. They rounded the corner past the elevator to the main hallway and then hurried on to the study. This time, Flynn didn’t hesitate at the door and pushed it open as soon as he reached it. The ringing bell cut off as soon as they entered the room.

Flynn turned on the light and they moved into the middle of the room. The door to the hidden staircase hung open and Flynn wracked his mind to remember if it had been like that when they arrived. With the light on, they were able to inspect the room. Judith found the call button and tested it herself, setting off the now-familiar ring from down the hall. Otherwise, the bell had fallen silent and Flynn tried not to think that it was because it had succeeded in summoning them here.

In the light, fear slipped away. At least, it did until the door slammed shut. Flynn spun, and then immediately turned around again at the sensation of being watched.

Judith clutched the recorder like a weapon as she looked around. “Something is happening. Someone’s… here.”

Her words give Flynn a chill, but then he realized that was because the temperature in the room had dropped. Flynn did not believe in ghosts, but right now that belief was more hope than certainty.

“Let’s do an EVP session,” Judith said. “If something rang the bell to get us here, it might be trying to communicate with us.”

EVP stood for ‘electronic voice phenomenon.’ The theory was that sometimes spirits attempted communicated, but their voices were only heard when listening to a recording later on. They did them often, but if they got anything at all, the ‘voices’ were so distorted that they could be saying anything you want them to say.

Judith set the recorder on the desk and turned it on. After giving the time and date and stating who was in the room, she started. “Good evening. What is your name?” She left a long pause for the assumed ghost to answer. “In what year were you born?”

Flynn folded his arms and looked around the room. Judith ran through a standard gamut of interview questions, keeping her tone calm and conversational. Flynn was already on edge with the kind of doubt in his skepticism that only came at midnight; he didn’t think he would be as calm as Judith if he believed for sure that a ghost was in the room with them.

“Why did you summon us to the study?” Judith asked after getting through the biographical questions.

The study light flicked off at the same time the light in the hidden stairway turned on. The message couldn’t be more clear: come this way.

“What do you want to show us?” Judith asked, her voice still level as she stared at the doorway.

Flynn’s mind buzzed, but that might have been the tension in the air. Something was happening that he didn’t understand and his muscles shook with the need to do something about it.

“We are not here to force you to leave this place,” Judith said firmly. “We don’t want to disturb you. Is there anything we can do for you?”

In the ensuing silence, Flynn strode toward the open door. It was just a faulty light switch and broken hinges. He was going to prove that to himself so he could stop freaking out over nothing. Just as Flynn was about to reach the staircase, the door swung shut with such speed that the wind rustled his hair as it flew past. Flynn jumped back with a sharp inhale. Absent the light from the staircase, the study fell to darkness.

“Whoa!” Raven shouted.

Flynn turned and could only make out the fuzzy shapes of Raven and Judith based on them moving. They were standing close together, which meant that other shape, that vaguely human-sized shadow in the corner of the room, was -

Raven flipped on his flashlight, which filled with room with vertical shadows as he had it aimed at the ceiling. Raven clung to Judith’s arm while Judith looked at him with amusement. Flynn blinked, checked the corner again, and confirmed that no one was standing there.

“I think we should leave.” Judith turned off the recorder. “That slamming door could have hurt you, Flynn. I don’t feel welcome here.”

Flynn couldn’t stop looking in the corner. It must of been a trick of the eye, but it had seemed so real only a minute ago. All he knew for sure was that he agreed that he didn’t feel welcome anymore, but he couldn’t pinpoint why.

Flynn found he was surprised when they walked out of the study because he’d half-expected the door to be locked. They returned to the dining room in silence and then went back to their spots around the table. Flynn looked down at his sheet of tic-tac-toe, but couldn’t imagine jumping back into the simple game. Whatever had happened in the study, it had been something. Something that he didn’t understand, and that he didn’t know if he could explain.

“I want to play the tape right now,” Judith said. “Do either of you object?”

“Go ahead,” Raven said with a wave of his hand.

Usually they waited until the next morning to listen to all of the recordings with a clear head, but after what had happened, Flynn could empathize with the desire to check it right now. She hit play and all three of them leaned in.

“What is your name?” Judith’s voice said.

She had turned the volume up to let them hear possible EVPs. Background static fuzzed when her voice ended, which was broken up by a crackling sound. It might have been a distorted voice, or it could have been just a blip in the static.

Judith hit pause. “Could anyone make that out?”

“Sounded like three syllables ta me,” Raven said.

Judith hit play again. After her she’d asked about year of birth, they hear five more blips of static.

“I heard eighteen something,” Flynn said, staring at the recorder. He wanted to believe that it was just his mind trying to make order out of chaos, but against his better judgement, he was getting sucked into Judith and Raven’s belief. Something had slammed that door in his face with more force than a shift of floorboards or light breeze could manage. Maybe that something had been recorded?

They ran through the questions, pausing after each one to discuss possible meanings. The fact that there was reliably a blip of static after each question made it harder and harder for Flynn to remain skeptical. He got drawn into trying to interpret what he found to be the most convincing and distinguishable EVPs he’d ever heard. Could those grainy fuzzy syllables have been, ‘I live here’? A string of fuzz after Judith asked if they knew anything about the disappearances was mostly garbled, but Flynn thought he could pick out a few words: ‘keeper’, ‘protect’, ‘taking’, and ‘circle’.

Then they reached Judith’s question about being summoned, and the static in the background increased as if a strong wind had picked up. The increased noise made it even hard to pick out what the answer was. The only word Flynn thought he’d made out was, ‘find.’ The static rose to a fury of buzzing like a disturbed beehive, through which they could barely make out sharp screeches of the possible voice.

“What was that?” Raven said when Judith hit stop.

“They were screaming,” Judith said, staring at the recorder. “They sounded afraid. Could either of you make it out?”

Flynn frowned. “It sounded like… ‘coming’. It’s coming? He’s coming?”

They all shared a nervous look. In all their ghost hunts, they had never experienced something like this.

“I think…” Judith said softly, “that I want to do a seance.”


	6. Journals

Judith found Yuri in Raven’s van at the end of the night. He sat in the back seat as the rest of the gang loaded equipment into the back. He had tried to help with that job, but his friends had all demanded he sit down and leave it to them at least until he had two working arms again. The others were still outside when Judith slid in beside him.

“Good evening. Did you have an interesting night?”

“Sure,” Yuri said. “We updated you on the things we heard, right?” After Flynn, Judith, and Raven filled the others in on what had happened with the bell and the study, his and Estelle’s report of intermittent knocking on the walls seemed tame. He was still fairly sure that was just faulty plumbing banging about.

“You did. And, I need to ask you a favour. Someone in the house was trying to contact us, and I think something stopped them. I want to do a seance to establish proper communication.”

Yuri nodded. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“I want to make sure I contact a friendly person, and not whatever being interrupted us tonight. I want to contact someone I know I can trust, who might be in the building.”

Yuri stiffened when he realized what she was asking. He turned away and fixed his gaze on a streetlight. “Do what you want.”

“If you’re willing, it would help me if I had an item she owned to try to fixate on her. Something she wore or carried frequently, or was important to her.”

Yuri closed his eyes and let out a breath. “You really think this will help?”

“I do. You know I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t think it was important.”

She was right. Once, when they had barely met, she had offered to do a seance to contact his mom. Yuri had turned her down as politely as he could, which Flynn had later said was quite rudely. Judith hadn’t brought it up a second time in the two years he’d known her, and never tried to convince him that her psychic powers were real. Even Flynn had been strangely quiet and thoughtful while they explained what had happened, so he had no doubt that whatever had gone on had been enough to confirm for Judith that a ghost was around.

“Yeah. Fine,” Yuri said. “But I don’t want to be in the room for the actual thing.”

“I understand completely. Thank you.” She left the van to help the others finish loading.

Yuri leaned his head against the cool window and tried to think of what he’d get for her. The problem with needing an item that the person had carried on their person frequently was that all those items had gone missing with Mom. Some of her things had been retrieved from the house, though. She had left her purse, a bag of snacks, and her laptop on a table. Something in her purse would probably qualify as being personal enough. He still wasn’t sure what to do, because that stuff was in Alexei’s possession. He didn’t want to risk giving Alexei any reason to suspect he was still going to the castle, so he would need to search the house when Alexei was gone.

The rest of the group piled into the van and they took off. Once Zaphias Castle was retreating in the distance, Rita said, “So… anyone have any thoughts about what happened tonight?”

Judith was the first to speak. “Something is deeply wrong in that house.”

“You said the ghost who spoke to you has a three syllable name, right?” Estelle asked. “So, I was thinking…. Nathaniel Tattersall has often been suggested as haunting the castle.”

Karol put his fingers to his chin and looked down in contemplation. “That makes a lot of sense. Since the voice said, ‘protect’ and ‘circle,’ I was thinking it might have to do with the ring of witches’ marks we found in the bedroom.”

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Raven said.

“Really? You think so?” Karol looked up with a smile.

“It’s a logical connection,” Rita said with a shrug. “Of course, since we did already know about a protective circle in the house, that probably subconsciously influenced you to hear it on the recording.”

Everyone waited for Flynn, the one skeptic who had heard the recording, to agree with Rita and his silence said as much as any words would have.

“The voice on the recording being Nathaniel is my best guess, too,” Judith said. “But what I wonder about even more is who - or what - dragged him away at the end?”

Fear seeped back into Karol’s voice. “W-what do you mean, ‘what’?”

Estelle sounded somewhere between excited and terrified. “We know Nathaniel had an interest in the occult. Do you think he summoned something?”

“That’s not a bad guess,” Judith said. “There must be a reason he carved those protective marks around his bed. He was afraid of something in the house, and wanted to make sure it couldn’t reach him while he slept. Perhaps that something is still here.”

Raven whistled. “Anyone suddenly have an urge ta study how ta make witches’ marks?”

Rita shrugged. “Why bother? Assuming all this is true, they don’t work. Whatever it was got him in the end.”

In the ensuing silence, the rest of the group no doubt thought about what sort of ‘something’ might have killed Nathaniel. Yuri, meanwhile, found his mind drifting further back as he recalled the sensation of a garrote on his neck, squeezing the life out of him. He’d been strangled by a loop of cord, a doctor had told him. It was only the lack of air and ensuing crash that caused him to dream up a scenario with a ghostly stalker. At least… that was the explanation that made sense. Flynn had been so quiet this evening. He’d clearly seen something that rattled him, and if what Flynn had seen tonight had been real, could it be possible that what he remembered from that night was real, too?

* * *

The next day was Sunday. They planned to return to the castle that evening for Judy’s séance, but for that to happen, Yuri needed to acquire an item she could use to focus on his mom. To do that, he needed to rifle through Alexei’s stuff.

Luckily, Alexei was out of the house this afternoon. Alexei never told Yuri how long he would be out. Sometimes he left just to go to the drug store around the corner, and sometimes he was meeting a friend for lunch and wouldn’t be back until evening. It had frustrated Yuri since he was a teenager, because as much as he loved the sense of freedom that came with being home alone, he could never relax when he knew Alexei might walk through the door at any second. Today, Yuri was pretty sure Alexei had gone to work. He needed to take a couple hours off tomorrow to drive Yuri to his physical therapist, so he would be going in today to make up for it. He probably had at least three hours before Alexei returned, but he wouldn’t put it past Alexei to come home early just to catch him off guard. The most time he could be reasonably sure of was one hour.

Yuri stood at the bottom of the stairs and considered where to go. There were a few places that Alexei might store Mom’s belongings. First, there was Yuri’s own box of mementos. He had photos, old toys she’d given him, a stack of construction paper Mother’s Day cards that she’d kept, and her old tzedakah box. None of those were things she’d kept close on her person, though. That meant he needed to look through Alexei’s things, which could be either in the basement, in his office, or his bedroom.

Yuri would leave the basement for the end, because stairs hurt and that staircase was steeper. As for the office, a childish instinct warned him that Alexei would be furious if got caught snooping in there. The only two rooms in the house that had always been absolutely off-limits to him were the mini-bar and the office. Alexei had once caught Yuri snooping in the mini-bar when he was fifteen. After spending an entire weekend locked in the guest room in the basement, Yuri hadn’t had much motivation to try again, and he had never set foot in the office.

So, he’d check the bedroom first and hopefully find something there. Yuri crossed the upstairs landing from his room and pushed open the door. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was entering the lion’s den. With his ears peeled for the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, Yuri headed for the closet. He saw what he was looking for immediately: a file box with his mom’s name printed in black marker sitting on the top shelf. Yuri grabbed the corner and carefully let it slip off the shelf and onto his chest. From there he could support it underneath with his arm in the sling and then lower it to the floor. For a second he considered taking it back to his room because he wasn’t comfortable in here, but the faster he could put it away, the better.

Yuri tried not to think too deeply about any of the items he went through. He put aside her favourite book and didn’t bother looking through the jewellery box. She’d never been a big fan of jewellery, so nothing in there would be personal enough. He flipped through a folder of official documents and then picked up a zip sealed plastic bag containing her wallet and a handful of loose cards. Yuri opened it and pulled out her driver’s license, long expired. There was a card for the public library, her bank and credit cards, and a gift card she hadn’t gotten around to spending yet.

He found an old wallet photo with bent edges of the two of them. In the picture, Yuri was about four years old and far more interested in the ice cream cone in his hands than the camera. They were on a pier by the lake, and Mom leaned down behind him with her hands on his shoulders and a beaming smile. Other than dark hair, she didn’t look very much like him. Yuri took after his East Asian father, a man he’d never met and rarely thought about. He considered giving Judith this photo, but he didn’t like the idea of all his friends passing around a photo of him with a ice cream smeared all over his face.

Yuri wondered if the simple leather wallet itself was personal enough, and then his eyes fell on the little pewter ghost charm tied to the zipper. He had a sudden memory of watching her remove it from a beat-up wallet and transfer it to this one.

“It’s good luck!,” she’d said to the six-year-old Yuri watching her from across the kitchen table. “My bubbie gave it to me when I was a little girl, after I got really invested in ghosts.”

Yuri had thought it was really cool, and a few days later, Mom had given him a cheap plastic ghost ring. Yuri wore it to school for three whole weeks before losing it.

Yuri pulled the charm off the wallet. This would do.

He started packing everything away again when he noticed a spiral-ringed notebook on the bottom of the box. Yuri vaguely remembered seeing her scribbling away in a notebook like this, and pulled it out. The pages were ragged from frequent use, and it felt like bits of thicker paper had been taped on various pages within. Yuri began flipping through pages and found photos of houses, charts of temperatures, full pages of writing, and bulleted lists of ideas. This was her ghost hunting book, he realized when he opened to a page with a heading giving the address of a house and a brief explanation of a ghostly dog seen in the backyard. The last quarter of the pages were blank, but Yuri flipped back from the end until he found the cover page for her final case: Zaphias Castle.

Yuri looked to the bedroom door, the book in his hands, and the time on his phone. He didn’t have time to sit on the floor here and read it, but Alexei probably wouldn’t notice if he took it. Alexei had never been interested in her ghost hobby, and the dust on the top layer of mementos said he didn’t go through this box very often. Yuri rarely went through his own, for that matter. He knew looking through it would hurt, and he rarely felt like subjecting himself to that without cause.

With everything packed into the box, Yuri awkwardly manoeuvred it up his chest and cursed the stupid cast on his arm for getting in the way. He was supposed to get it off in just under two weeks, and the day couldn’t come soon enough. Once it was back on the shelf, he tucked the pilfered notebook into his sling to free up his hand, closed the closet, and left the room feeling like a spy completing a top secret mission.

Back in his room, Yuri settled into bed and opened the notebook to the Zaphias Castle section. On the first page, Mom had written a brief history of the house. None of it was new to Yuri, so he skimmed through and glanced at the list of contact information. In blue pen, she had written the names and numbers of the castle manager and a tour guide. In black, clearly written later, was the name Catherine Williams and a phone number. Catherine Williams must be some other source of information about the castle, but Mom had clearly assumed she’d remember who she was and not written that down.

The next page contained a list of names, many of them with attached ages and descriptions. At the top was the heading, “Disappearances.” Most of it was written in blue, but one name had later been squeezed in at the top in black: Howard Dale, painter, age 32, 1919. The rest of the list was in chronological order by the date, which Yuri assumed was the year of disappearance. At the bottom, Mom had jotted down a few observations that Yuri had also noticed when scanning the list:

Similarities:

-Almost all are low-ranking staff

-Young (< 30)

-Mostly women

-Disappearances take place between Alice’s death and Nathaniel’s, then a long gap before the 3 disappearances when it became a museum

Later, in black, she had scribbled a small note with an arrow pointing at the last bullet: Did Nat. Summon something that was only pacified once it took HIM?

Below the list began her write-up of her first night in the castle.

Day One (Friday): Zaphias Castle lives up to its reputation. Jen and I arrived around 8 and set up in the third floor hallway. The first couple of hours were fairly uneventful, but around midnight we heard footsteps walking around on the floor below us. We didn’t see anything when we went down there, but performed an EVP session. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the results yet; Jen has the tape. 

…I think something died in the elevator. Recently, I mean. I stood next to it in the hall and a horrible reek of rot came out. Maybe I’m just very sensitive, though, because Jen said she didn’t notice it. 

I researched the marks on the floor in the master bedroom when I got home last night. Apparently they’re known as “witches’ marks” and were used as barriers against the supernatural. They’re a part of folk magic traditions in the UK, and largely became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nathaniel is more widely studied than I had thought - most of his books in the study are focused on renaissance esotericism. 

To Learn: (1) what was Nathaniel hoping to keep out??? (2) Is there anything in western esoteric tradition that could result in bringing something malicious into the house? (3) Did Nathaniel ever dabble in demonology? (4) How exactly did Alice Tattersall die?

Her writing continued on the next page, this time dated for the next day. This wasn’t a report on her activities but a summary of research, and Yuri realized with a stab that this was what she had been doing that Saturday afternoon when they all went downtown and Alexei took him to the mall and then a movie while Mom was busy at the public library. They went out for dinner at a restaurant downtown after meeting up, and Yuri had been itching to get home and lock himself in his room to play a video game. It would be their last meal together.

Alice Tattersall, nee Dorsey - 

Born in 1886, married Nathaniel Tattersall in 1908. Three miscarriages and one stillbirth, but no children. According to the obituary I found in the Zaphias Times archives, she died late in the evening on April 23rd, 1919. Nathaniel had been away on a business trip the preceding week, and arrived home later that night. 

Police Headquarters is just down the block from the library, so I looked into the police report of her death (thanks Alexei for giving me access to the old archives xoxo). There was an enquiry into her death, but they determined it was accidental. She tripped and fell down the stairs in the grand hall, breaking her neck. Nathaniel arrived home about an hour after it happened. There was dispute about that because Nathaniel’s car was seen heading toward the castle at 9pm, but he didn’t actually arrive until 11. It turns out, however, that he stopped at a pub for a drink before arriving home (bartender confirmed he was there). The butler - Mr. Edwards - confirms that Nathaniel did not enter the house until 11, at which point he was informed of the accident. 

Alice was buried in Elucifer Memorial Cemetery three days later. The Tattersalls were the wealthiest family in Zaphias at the time, so there was a brief article about it. The article just went on about which notable socialites had been invited, of course. The only interesting bit was that it mentioned that there had been a break in at the funeral home the night before, but nothing was stolen. I feel like there’s something to that, but I can’t place what it might be. 

Did Alice really die in an accident? There were apparently no witnesses of the accident itself. The castle had a number of staff at the time - four maids, a butler, a cook, and a housekeeper - but none of them saw what happened. Could they have been covering up for someone? Who? 

Howard Dale - 

Very likely related. His family reported him missing four days after Alice’s death. According to the police report, he was a painter who had been commissioned to do a portrait of Nathaniel and Alice. I can’t find much information on him, but it can’t be a coincidence that he went missing around the same time Alice died. If it is related, that makes him the first person to disappear within the castle. Nathaniel was already into esotericism at this time, so could he have been the first victim of whatever Nathaniel meddled with? 

To Do: contact heritage foundation. Someone who worked in the castle might still be alive now, or have descendants with stories. 

When Yuri finished reading, he took a photo of the page and then attached it to a message to the Brave Vesperia group chat. Found my mom’s research in Alexei’s closet. Seems like there’s a lot going on in this house.

He decided not to send them the next few lines on the following page.

Day 2 (Saturday): Jen came down with something today and had to call it off. Alexei wanted me to stay in, too, but I after hearing Jen’s EVP recording, I have to get back there. 

That was the end of her journal. Yuri flipped through a couple empty pages but then quickly put the notebook aside; never had a blank page made him so miserable.

Thump! Yuri looked up at the sudden sound from the landing. “The hell?” He heaved himself off the bed and went to the landing. He saw the problem immediately: the abstract painting that hung on the wall near his door was now on the floor. His first thought was that the wire had snapped, except that the painting was also about five feet away from the wall. It looked as if the painting had simply decided to jump ship and thrown itself away from the wall. Yuri gripped the banister overlooking the front foyer for support as he crouched and then slid his hand down to pick up the painting. Balanced on his knee, he ran his fingers over the wire on the back. It seemed fine, and there were no marks on the backing.

“That’s… odd.” Yuri had to grip the wire with the fingers sticking out of his cast to free up his other hand to grab the banister for support getting up again. This cast couldn’t be gone soon enough. He returned the painting to the wall and then went back to his room.

* * *

Yuri spent the rest of his afternoon research esotericism. What started as a basic trip to Wikipedia to see what his mom had been talking about turned into a deep dive through increasingly amateur websites. Midway through, he decided he needed to tell one of his friends about this and had almost clicked Flynn’s name before remembering they weren’t on speaking terms. He ended up phoning Rita, and left his phone on speaker to free up his one functional hand to keep searching.

“Listen to this,” Yuri was saying. “The reason there are seventeen smaller hills around the big one is that seven plus one is eight, and eight is the infinity symbol.”

“What?!” Rita spluttered through the phone. “That’s not - it doesn’t even make sense! Newgrange was built five thousand years ago! Arabic numerals weren’t developed until five hundred AD at the earliest!”

Yuri shook his head with a sad smile. “You just don’t get it, Rita. We are eagles living like chickens. You gotta open your mind.”

“More like close my fist.”

Yuri scrolled further down the page. “You need to relax, Rita. Meditate. That’s how you-”

“If you suggest astral projection again, I’ll break your other arm.”

Yuri tried hard not to laugh. “That doesn’t sound very zen of you, Rita. Your chakras are very blocked.”

“I’m going to hang up on you in five seconds.”

“Wait, you’ll miss the part about immortal life.”

Rita rolled her eyes so hard Yuri could actually feel it happening. “I already know about the philosopher’s stone. I don’t get this esotericism thing. Isn’t that alchemy? Isn’t that its own thing?”

Yuri shrugged. “Yeah and it seems to involve a lot of the Kabbalah, too. Sort of a kitchen sink of mystical traditions.”

“It’s crazy that apparently Nathaniel Tattersall was into this stuff? In the 1930s? I can’t imagine anyone in the 20th century taking hermeticism seriously.”

“People still do today.” This wasn’t a great argument, because Yuri knew Rita’s general opinion of most people today.

“This is such nonsense. Freemasons and Illuminati and radio signals on the pyramids….” Rita’s frustrated exhale of breath made the speaker’s fuzz. “And look, Judith is great but all her psychic nonsense is tied into this, too.”

“Yeah, I read about psychic powers earlier”. Yuri absently scrolled further down a page with a starry night background image and yellow Comic Sans text. “Sorry, Rita, I don’t think your aura is calm enough to unlock your innate psychic powers.”

“I’ll tell you what you can do with your-”

The front door opened and Yuri said, “Gotta go - Alexei’s home.” He cancelled the call as he listened to footsteps come up the stairs. Alexei moved into his bedroom and Yuri switched to texting Rita.

Sorry for disappearing. Hope my abandonment didn’t cloud your aura too much.

Yuri could picture her angrily jabbing her screen with her thumbs as she sent her response: Mention that aura BS again and I’ll pound you. Anyway, it’s fine. Are you coming to the castle tonight?

Yeah, he wrote back. I need to give Judy a thing for the séance. No point making the old man drive me home after that.

His phone buzzed with a response, but at the same moment, his bedroom door opened. Yuri instinctively minimized his browser and looked up. “What do you want?”

Alexei stood in the doorway. For a long moment, he just looked at Yuri. It felt like he was trying to stare right through him, seeing all the secrets held inside. Finally, he said, “It’s rude to go through someone’s closet without permission.”

Yuri opened his mouth but stopped himself from demanding how the hell Alexei knew about that.

Seeing his face, Alexei said, “You put the box back facing the wrong way.”

Yuri gritted his teeth and looked away. Had he really been that careless? He thought he’d been careful.

Alexei approached the bed and Yuri closed his laptop. He put it on the nightstand as Alexei sat down on the edge of the bed. Yuri said nothing and just waited for Alexei to start berating him.

“If you wanted to look through your mother’s things, you only needed to ask.” Alexei’s voice was surprisingly gentle. He shifted sideways so he could face Yuri. “Is there something you were looking for in particular?”

“No,” Yuri answered honestly. “I just… wanted to see.”

After another long pause, Alexei put his hand down on the mattress and leaned back, making himself more comfortable. “You know… sometimes I envy you, Yuri.” When Yuri just stared at him in confusion, Alexei continued. “You had her in your life for eleven years. I only got five.”

Yuri looked out the window and muttered, “You missed out.”

“Yes…. I only knew her for five years, but your mother was a remarkable woman.” Now it was Alexei’s turn to look away and stare at the wall with a wistful expression. “She had… such a strong will. Once she set her mind to something, there was nothing I could do to convince her to back down.” He looked back at Yuri with a wry smile. “It’s no question where you get your stubborn streak from.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I know I’m not the parent you wanted,” he said simply. “To be honest, I never intended to have children. I asked to keep you after she died because I knew it would be what she wanted. We have had our disagreements over the years, but I hope you understand that I only want what’s best for you. I want you to be safe, and I want you to become a man your mother would be proud of.”

Confused emotions rolled around Yuri’s mind until he mumbled, “Yeah.”

“Parenting isn’t easy,” Alexei mused. “Especially step-parenting. Sometimes, you have to let yourself become the bad guy for your child’s own good. When you are older, you’ll understand why I had to be so strict, especially with Zaphias Castle. I will not allow your youthful fearlessness to get you killed following her footsteps. She wouldn’t want that. I owe it to her to protect you. You understand, don’t you?”

What did Alexei want him to day? That he understood? That he forgave him? Those two things weren’t linked, though. He knew that Alexei cared about him and wanted what was best for him, but couldn’t someone love you but also be horrible to you? Was he a terrible person for being unable to forgive Alexei for the things he’d done to him growing up? Yuri couldn’t imagine ever having kids himself, but if he did, he wanted to believe he wouldn’t treat them the way Alexei had treated him.

Yuri decided a simple grunt would be the best way to respond. For once, Alexei didn’t reprimand him.

Alexei rested his hand on Yuri’s knee and Yuri couldn’t help a small flinch. “If you want something of your mother’s, just ask.”

“Yeah… will do.”

Alexei left and Yuri leaned back on his pillow. He wished Alexei had just slapped him and told him off for snooping, because at least he knew how to deal with those emotions.

* * *

That night, Yuri handed the ghost charm to Judith. “This should work.”

Judith closed her hand around it like it was a rare and valuable treasure. “Thank you. I’ll give it back later tonight.”

In the entrance hall, Flynn said, “We can’t stay as late tonight. Some of us have school tomorrow. I think the plan is to just do the séance and head home afterwards?”

“Fine with me,” Yuri said. “Rita and I are planning to look for books in the study.” His mom’s journal had said Nathaniel’s occult books were in the study, so he wanted to see just what this guy had been into. Plus, it gave him something to do other than sit around and think about the séance happening. He’d always quietly respected Judith’s believe in séances and ghosts, but the thought of her trying to talk to his mom just made him feel weird.

“We should probably go to the round room,” Estelle said. “There’s a nice table there we can all sit around.”

“Have fun, guys,” Rita said, and then walked away toward the study.

Yuri had asked her to check out the study with him. He hadn’t thought she would care about the séance, and he’d been right. He didn’t actually think being alone in the house was dangerous, of course. That was silly, and he had only asked her because otherwise Karol and Estelle would freak out. It was only tangentially related that he’d re-read his mom’s journal multiple times this evening and couldn’t stop wondering about how different life would be if her friend hadn’t gotten sick.

They entered the study and shut the door. There was a small, glass-fronted bookshelf on the wall by the door which Rita went to first. She swung open the doors and sighed loudly. “Great. More bullshit.”

Yuri stood behind her and inspected the titles. They reminded him of the articles he’d read earlier today, but now phrases like Western Mystery Tradition and Secrets of Jewish Mysticism we printed on faded canvas book spines rather than cached geocities websites. “For some wild reason,” Yuri said, “I don’t really want to see what these 1920s authors had to say about Jewish mysticism.”

Rita grabbed a book at random and opened it to a picture of a Chinese monk meditating. She scanned a few lines that the early 20th century British author had written about Chinese practices and rolled her eyes. “Probably for the best.”

“Do you see anything about demonology? Summoning?”

“Hm….” Rita ran her finger along the dusty spines. “Don’t see anything about that. Oh, here’s one about ‘psychical research’. Let me see if this is any more… academic.”

Rita took the book to the chair across from the desk and began perusing the table of contents. Yuri continued scanning the books, not sure what he was looking for but hoping something would pop up. He grabbed a book because the spine had interesting circle patterns on it and slumped into the green leather chair in front of the desk.

Yuri absently flipped through the pages. Maybe something would stick out to him without having to actually read paragraphs of tiny, faded print. As he skimmed the headings and chapter names, his mind drifted to memories of his disastrous attempt at university and wondering what he was going to do about Alexei’s insistence he go back.

He started running his fingers over the lower lip of the desk with his broken arm. Words on the page jumped out at him, like transcendent and macrocosm. He hoped Rita was learning something possibly useful, because every word came into his brain and then left immediately without leave a footprint. He stared at a picture that had something to do with ancient Greek rituals and rubbed the edge of the desk until he suddenly heard a click. The underside of the desk thunked open like a car’s glove box.

“Hey, whoa.”

Rita looked up from her book. “What did you break?”

“I didn’t break anything! I think I found a secret compartment.”

“Let me see.” She rounded the desk and leaned over him to look into the compartment. “Well, it’s not very deep. It only had space for a book.” She pulled out an old, leather-bound journal held together with a clasp. The edges of the navy cover were curled with age and the paper visible between yellowed and cracking.

“You sure you want to look in there?” Yuri asked.

Rita was already prying open the clasp. “Of course.”

“I don’t know, sometimes it isn’t good to go peeking into a guy’s hidden private documents.”

Rita dropped it like it had set on fire. “Oh, yuck! You’re kidding!”

Yuri grabbed it from the desk. “Let’s find out.” He flipped it open and found a journal entry.

21st of September, 1918 - A summary of my experiences so far.

I’ve started this journal to record my growing understanding of my own psychical abilities. In retrospect, my abilities began to manifest during adolescence. I can recall many situations where an item was lost, and yet I was able to find it in the first place I looked. I chalked it up to ‘gut instinct’, but I believe now that it was my latent ESP guiding my thoughts. That is just one example of the many ways I have been in touch with the occult from a young age.

The catalysing event, however, was the injury that put me out of the war. I am certain that the bullet should have killed me. I saw the enemy raise his rifle to shoot, and on instinct I raised my hand, as if to protect myself. By all rights, he should have shot me in the throat, but as if by magic, the bullet veered to the left and hit my shoulder instead. Everyone tells me I am very lucky, but I know the truth: I moved the bullet with my mind.

Yuri looked up at Rita to see her reaction to the page. She already had her arms crossed, leaned against the desk, and was waiting patiently for him to finish. Suddenly self-conscious about how much faster she read, he passed the book to her. “What do you make of it?”

“He thought he had psychic powers. Obviously he was a whacko.” She flipped through the next few pages. “He’s trying to bend spoons with his mind. Every day he tries again and measures how much it bent. He’s measuring in micrometres, but I doubt he even has a device precise enough to measure such tiny changes. Oh and here he claims to be harnessing the power of lucid dreaming to watch himself sleep, and then says he was able to move a newspaper a whole millimetre with his mind.”

“Or the wind moved it.”

Rita gave him a look like he’d never been more of a Captain Obvious and dropped the journal on the desk. “You think he hid it because this is embarrassing?”

“He wouldn’t think it’s embarrassing. He seems pretty convinced it’s real. He probably hid it because he didn’t want other people to know the extent of his amazing powers.” Yuri fiddled with the latch that had held the secret compartment in place. What he couldn’t figure out was how to trigger it opening. As far as he could tell, the wood he’d been running his fingers over was smooth and polished. The compartment was held in place by a wooden peg that slid into a socket, but he couldn’t see any attached mechanism to actually move it. His best guess was that it was triggered by banging on the table and dislodging the latch. By now the latch must be very old, so maybe he or Rita had nudged the table just right to get it come undone. It was an amazing stroke of luck, because he assumed no one working on restoring the house had found it for over fifty years, or else this journal would be part of the museum.

“Your mom was right, though,” Rita said. “He’s really into this psychic stuff, but I haven’t seen anything about demons or summoning, or anything about 17th century folk magic. It’s-”

Whatever ‘it’ was, Rita didn’t get to say it because a loud crash jerked their attention to the door. A shout that sounded like Karol made Yuri get to his feet faster than was good for his back. “Something happened.”

Rita had already opened the panel that led to the hidden staircase. “Let’s go make sure they’re ok.”


	7. Forgive Me

Yuri and Rita left for the study, and Flynn followed the rest of the group upstairs. As much as Yuri continually avoiding him irritated Flynn, he couldn’t fault Yuri tonight. He knew it had already been a big concession on Yuri’s part to give Judith something of his mom’s and condone the séance, so Flynn didn’t begrudge him not wanting to take part in the actual thing.

On their way up the stairs, Flynn considered how he would feel if it was his father Judith was attempting to reach. For a fleeting second, he realized he had a hint of regret that it wasn’t. This surprised him, because he’d always been completely on Yuri’s side in regards to séances. It was all a hoax, and invoking his dad’s name as part of the sham would have irritated him. After what he’d seen last night, though, he couldn’t shake the niggling thought that a séance might actually work.

On the second floor, Estelle led them to the round room. This was an aptly named room that bulged outward from the side of the house and formed part of the tower. Estelle turned on the overheard chandelier to illuminate creamy yellow walls, heavy curtains over floor-to-ceiling windows, a white marble fireplace, and a round table in the centre of the room beneath a lacy tablecloth. Estelle unclipped the velvet rope and stood aside to let them past the visitor section of the room and to the table.

“Be careful around the furniture,” she advised before following them to the table. “It’s original to the room.”

“Is it really ok for us to sit here?” Karol looked around anxiously as he positioned their tripod and camera beside the table.

“It’s fine,” Estelle said. “We block the rooms off from general visitors because having a hundred people a day wander in and lean on things would be dangerous, but little things like this are ok.”

They organized themselves around the table. Judith set her bag on the floor by her chair and pulled out nine candlesticks. These she arranged in a circle in the middle of the table.

“Do the number of candles matter?” Estelle asked, eyes fixed on the match in Judith’s hand as she went around lighting them.

“The more the better,” Judith said. “The warmth and energy invites spirits in, and a number divisible by three is better.” Right in the centre of the table, she placed the little ghost charm Yuri had given her. Judith turned off the lights and took her seat between Flynn and Estelle. “We’re trying to make the the room inviting and appealing for them.”

“And they don’t like bright lights, right?” Estelle asked.

Judith nodded. “Spirits tend to be more active in the dark. Harsh light makes it harder for them to materialize.”

It was good that Yuri wasn’t here, Flynn thought. He knew Judith was approaching this from years of experience with spirituality, but he couldn’t help but think it sounded like she was comparing Yuri’s mom to a moth. Judith held out her hands and the group formed a ring. It was something about a chain of energy, Flynn remembered from the last time. On his left, Judith’s hand was cool and firm. On his right, Karol’s small hand trembled with either excitement or nerves.

“Everyone needs to be quiet now,” Judith said. “Continue holding hands until we’re done. It’s very important to not break the circle. Please remain still and don’t make noise until I’ve established contact.”

Estelle looked frantic. “But how will we know when-?!”

“Shh, you’ll know,” Judith said and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “We are reaching out for Anya Lowell. Anya, if you can hear me, please join us.”

Flynn couldn’t help glancing around the room. So far, nothing seemed to have changed.

“If there are any spirits in the room, please make yourself known.”

The candles flickered. Estelle and Karol gasped and Judith opened her eyes for a second to silently warn them not to say anything.

“We would like to speak with Anya Lowell,” Judith said in a calm, firm voice. “If Anya is in the room, please knock twice.”

Judith sat calmly with her eyes closed, but everyone else’s eyes darted about. A sudden knock on the table, as if one of them had leaned forward and banged on the centre, made every sans Judith jump. After the second knock, Karol squeezed Flynn’s hand so tightly, he feared injury.

The tension in Judith’s hand relaxed slightly and she wore a faint smile. “Thank you, Anya. From now on, knock once for no and twice for yes. We are seeking answers about the house. Are you the only spirit in Zaphias Castle?”

In the tense silence, Flynn saw his own nervous face reflected in the mirror over the mantle across from him. The dim candlelight made the room’s shadows loom. He briefly mistook a shadow reflected in the mirror for the same shadowy figure he’d seen in the study the night before, but it was only a curtain. A single solid knock distracted him from the mirror.

Flynn breathed in sharply. By this point, he had given up trying to debunk what was happening in the moment and decided to just go along with it. He, Yuri, and Rita could work out a reasonable explanation tomorrow.

Then Judith asked, “Do the other spirits in the house mean us harm?”

Flynn’s aching ribs were enough of an answer for him, but it was two knocks that came from the table this time. He shivered, setting off the bruises all over his side, and realized the room was growing cold.

Either not noticing or not minding the cold, Judith continued. “Did you die within Zaphias Castle?”

She didn’t, Flynn told himself. She left the grounds and went down to the river. Thump. Thump.

“Was it an accident?” Judith asked.

Thump. The ‘no’ struck the table with enough force to make the candles wobble and the flames flickered.

“Speak to me,” Judith said. “Speak and I will listen. Tell me what happened to you.”

Flynn shivered again. Goosebumps ran along his arms and Karol’s hand trembled with either fear or the cold.

“She says….” Judith spoke dreamily, eyes closed and face passive. “Betrayed…. Trapped…. And… something else. She’s trying to send a message to a specific person.”

“It’s gotta be Yuri,” Raven whispered.

Half of Flynn wished Yuri had elected to come after all, and the other half was glad Yuri wasn’t hearing this while all his friends were watching. Yuri would probably prefer to here any posthumous message from his mother in private. Flynn asked, “Can we help you deliver it?’

The knocks didn’t come on the table this time, but the walls: two loud bangs that reverberated around the room. Flynn whipped his head around at the sound, and when he faced forward again he saw a sixth person looming right behind him in the mirror. Flynn jerked around with a shout, Judith’s hand slipping from his grasp as he twisted and set off pain through his bruises.

“No!” Judith cried.

There was nothing behind him, but as soon as he lost his grip on Judith, a cold gust of wind rushed through the room and extinguished the candles. It continued roaring around the room as Karol shouted and his chair creaked as he scooted closer to Raven. The table shook like a train was rattling by outside, and the temperature in the room had plunged so low that Flynn couldn’t stop shivering.

“What’s going on!?” Estelle’s panic was clear in her voice even if it was impossible to see her. The only light in the room now was the tiny red light from the camera.

“Judy? Darlin’?” Raven said, his nerves peaking through his bravado. “What do we do now?”

Flynn still held Karol’s hand, even though his arm was now outstretched to account for Karol being right next to Raven. His other hand waved in the darkness, searching for Judith’s.

“I’m sorry.” Judith finally spoke, her voice slow and calm. In the same dreamy tone, she continued. “I’m sorry, my darling. Forgive me. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive-”

Flynn found her shoulder in the dark and shook. “Hey! Snap out of it!”

Judith flinched under his hand and then suddenly breathed in sharply. She found his hand and grasped his wrist in a frozen clamp. Then, there was a deafening crash from across the room that could only be the mirror falling. Flynn’s mind filled with images of broken glass all over the floor and he yelled, “Nobody move!”

“W-what’s going on!?” Karol shouted.

“Everyone, resume the circle,” Judith said firmly over the rush of wind. “We need to take control of the energy.”

Karol shook like a leaf and Flynn fought the urge to twist around again. He knew it must just be the wind tickling the hair on the back of his neck, but couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was there.

“Be at peace,” Judith said, squeezing Flynn’s hand. “Be at peace, Anya. You have to let go and leave us be.”

With a loud bang the door to the round room slammed open. In the same instant, the wind rushed to the windows and disappeared like it had been sucked out. The room’s lights switched on and Yuri said, “What the hell is going on up here?”

Judith dropped her hands and the circle fell apart. She took a deep breath and slumped forward, resting her forehead on her arms. Estelle gasped and leaned over her, rubbing her shoulder and babbling concern.

Rita appeared at Yuri’s elbow. “What happened? Are you guys alright?”

“It was my fault.” Flynn stood slowly, unable to tear his eyes from the hundred points of broken light scattered across the floor. Something had broken the mirror and it wasn’t confirmation bias or the ideomotor effect. Something had been standing behind him. Something had banged on the walls. His insistence that there was no such thing as ghosts was starting to feel naive. “I broke the circle. I’m so sorry.”

Rita picked up the fallen tripod as Yuri walked slowly into the room. “You alright, Judy?”

“Yes.” Her head was still down, her voice uncharacteristically small. “Just… tired.”

“What happened, Flynn?” Karol asked. He was now allowing himself to move away from Raven to examine the broken mirror. “Why did you break the circle?”

Flynn cringed with guilt. “I panicked. I thought I saw someone behind me.”

Raven looked to him sharply. “Who’d ya see? Was it…?” He glanced at Yuri and trailed off.

Yuri gave Raven a look and then turned his attention to Flynn. “Yeah, Flynn. Was it?”

Flynn was usually a pro at reading Yuri’s expressions, but now he was lost and couldn’t tell if Yuri was hoping for an affirmation or denial. All he could give him was a shrug. “I honestly don’t know. They weren’t defined enough to make out more than a basic human shape.”

Rita took the camera off the tripod. “I sure hope this thing was on.”

“It should be,” Judith said from her arms.

“Judith,” Estelle said, “what happened earlier? When you kept repeating yourself?”

Judith raised her head and creased her brow. “What did I say?”

Karol looked up from where he was crouched by the mirror. “You don’t remember?”

“Ya said, ‘I’m sorry,” Raven said. “Then ‘forgive me’ over and over until Flynn here snapped ya out of it.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Estelle asked.

Judith straightened up and rubbed her temples. “Very rarely. Channelling a spirit’s voice like that takes a lot out of me. I think we should pack up and leave the house. We stirred something up and I still feel the tension.”

“Should we clean up the mirror, first?” Karol asked.

“Oh, no!” Estelle spun around, finally focusing on something other than Judith. “The mirror!” She clutched her hands together. “Oh, no, that was original to the house. It’s over a hundred years old!”

Karol blanched. “Are we, uh, going to be in trouble for this?”

“We didn’t touch it,” Raven pointed out.

“I don’t know.” Estelle gazed forlornly at the broken antique like it was a corpse. “I’ll talk to my boss about it. Oh, he’s going to be so upset…. First the chandelier and now this. Leave it where it is; they might want to collect the pieces for restoration.”

“Judy’s right,” Yuri said. “We should get out of here.”

They filed out of the room and Flynn took the camera from Rita. “Yuri, you should hear what was said. I’ll show you in the elevator.”

Yuri seemed hesitant, but the serious look on Flynn’s face sold him. “Fine. See you guys outside.” The rest of the group headed for the stairs while Yuri and Flynn headed for the elevator. As soon as the rest of the group was out of sight, Yuri slumped against the wall and let out a pain groan.

Flynn was on him in a second, one hand on his shoulder. “Yuri! Are you ok?”

“Yeah,” Yuri grunted. “Ran upstairs when we heard a crash. Probably shouldn’t have.”

“You need to be more careful. You have to give your body time to recover before you push yourself. If you don’t-”

“I know, Flynn.” Yuri brushed him off and pushed against the wall to straighten up. “You don’t have to baby me.”

“I’m sorry. I just worry about you.”

Yuri took a few steps from the wall, stumbled, and grabbed Flynn. Flynn wordlessly pulled Yuri’s arm over his shoulders and help him limp down the hall.

“I really don’t need someone obsessing over my safety. I get enough of that from Alexei.”

Flynn cringed. Yuri had always done his best to pretend everything was fine and keep his friends from worrying about him, but even if Yuri wasn’t willing to use the word ‘abuse’, Flynn recognized Yuri’s home life for what it was.

“Yuri… I really am sorry. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable in the hospital, and I’m sorry I was mad at you for being mad at me.” This weekend at the castle had taught Flynn two things: first, he really did want to spend time with Yuri again and second, he had much more important things to worry about than friendship drama. What had happened in the round room could not be explained rationally and Flynn felt like his world had been upended. In all this confusion, he just wanted Yuri to be his friend again so he had something to anchor to.

“Yeah… well… sorry I freaked out on you.”

When they reached the elevator, Yuri leaned against the wall again while Flynn fiddled with the camera to play back the séance. Yuri would want to watch it while it was just the two of them. “Here. This is where it started. What do you think?”

Flynn listened and watched Yuri’s face as the scene played. Yuri remained rigid, emotion twitching around his eyes every time Judith said his mom’s name. When it reached the part where Judith began begging forgiveness, Yuri’s jaw set and an angry frown took over his face.

When it was over, he handed it back to Flynn and said simply, “That wasn’t my mom.”

“She… did say she was,” Flynn said hesitantly.

Yuri shrugged his good shoulder. “And I can say I’m Napoleon. Doesn’t make it true. My mom never called me ‘darling’, and she never used that for Alexei, either. Whoever that was, it wasn’t Mom.”

“I believe you.” Yuri’s confidence helped bolster Flynn’s own doubt. It may have seemed like it was Anya in the beginning, but he couldn’t believe she would frighten them and smash the mirror like that. Flynn snapped the viewfinder shut and hit the button for the elevator. “If it wasn’t her, though, then who was it?”

“I don’t know. Assuming that was a real ghost - and I’m still hesitant about that - they lied about being my mom to get you to keep talking to them. I don’t trust them.”

The elevator door slid open and Yuri recoiled with his hand at his nose. “Oh, gross.”

“Hm?” Flynn looked between Yuri and the elevator in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t smell that?” Yuri’s face was still partially hidden by his hand.

“Smell what?”

Now it was Yuri’s turn to look confused. “It smells like something died in there.”

Flynn took a deep whiff and shook his head. “I don’t smell anything?”

Yuri stared at him, shook his head, and got in the elevator. “Weird.”

Flynn hurried in after him. “Does it smell fresh? Like a rat died in the walls?”

“I dunno.” Yuri sniffed again and wrinkled his nose. “Smells like it’s coming from below.”

Flynn stared at the ground as they descended. “How strange. I don’t smell a thing.”

“It’s weird. My mom mentioned this same thing in her journal - that she smelled death in the elevator, but her friend didn’t.”

“You found her journal?”

“Oh, yeah, forgot to tell you about that.”

Yuri updated Flynn on what he’d found on their way to the front door. On their way outside, Flynn said, “We need to find this Catherine Williams person. Your mom already did so much background research for us.”

“Yeah, we can do that sometime this week.”

Outside, they found Rita filling the others in on the diary she and Yuri had found in the desk. Estelle looked starry-eyed at the idea of a secret compartment in the desk, while Judith leaned against the van with her arms crossed and a look of concentration on her face.

“What I don’t understand,” Judith said when Yuri arrived, “is how you opened the compartment, Yuri.”

“Hey, don’t ask me. I’d guess I was just lucky and happened to be sitting there when the mechanism finally gave out.”

“Hmm…” She frowned at him and then climbed into the car.

After the drama this evening, Flynn was ready to head home as well.

* * *

On Monday, Yuri sat on his bed and opened his mom’s journal to the list of contacts. He stared at her compiled notes for a long minute, ruminating on the night before.

He didn’t believe in ghosts. He had been so sure about that belief for ten years now. After seeing the clip from the séance, though… and how shaken Flynn was from what he’d seen…. The idea that the world was a lot bigger and more complicated than he’d been willing to believe left him rattled, and the worst part was that he suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about a dark catwalk and a cord around his throat. Yuri absently ran his fingers over his throat where the bruises had long-since faded. The idea that a ghost had snuck up behind him and tried to strangle him, and it was only the opportune timing of the catwalk’s collapse that saved his life, was difficult to accept.

To distract himself from this emotional crisis, he dialled Catherine Williams’ phone number and listened to it ring. He only had to wait a few rings for an elderly voice to say, “Hello?”

“Hey. Uh… sorry, this is really out of the blue, but are you Catherine Williams?”

“I am. What is this about, please?”

Bless old people for having the same phone for over ten years, Yuri thought. “I got this number from the heritage society that runs Zaphias Castle. I’m, uh, researching it. Is there anything you can tell me about it?”

“Oh, how lovely. Yes, my mother used to work in the castle when she was a girl.”

“Ok, great. Did she ever tell you stories about it?”

“Yes, of course. She’s still alive, thought. You can speak with her yourself.”

Yuri had to blink. “Seriously? Uh, did the castle employ toddlers?”

Catherine laughed. “No, she worked there when she was sixteen years old. She’s 102 now.”

“Wow. I mean, good for her. Can you put her on, then?”

“Why don’t you come and speak with her in person, dear? She doesn’t get many visitors these days.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll probably come with a friend, if that’s ok?”

“Of course, dear.”

Yuri turned the volume up on his phone so that he could set it down and use his one good arm to type her address and arranged time on his laptop. He thanked her, hung up, and sent a message to the group chat updating them on this development. He didn’t know yet which friend was going, only that whenever they had to interview people about a house’s history in the past, Yuri was banned from conducting these meetings alone. Something about ‘lacking tact.’

He had just hung up when he heard Alexei come home. It was just past noon and he had a physical therapy appointment today. Yuri enjoyed these appointments because he always left feeling sore, exhausted, but optimistic. The pain came from pushing his limits, and considering he’d hobbled into his first appointment on crutches, he was happy to push those limits as much as possible.

Alexei called him from downstairs and Yuri crawled off the bed and grabbed his coat. He met Alexei in the foyer, still in his police uniform and holding car keys. Being trapped in a vehicle with Alexei all the way to the therapist’s office was the price he paid to recover. As soon as he got into the car, he pulled out his phone to ignore Alexei to the best of his ability. He scrolled through the group chat once again, reading over everyone’s confused and scared gushing about the night before. They had added Estelle to the group, which meant at least double the amount of emojis usually present in the chat.

“Did you have a nice morning?” Alexei asked as they pulled onto a major road to take them downtown.

Yuri didn’t look up. “Sure.”

“Have you checked the local news today?”

Yuri glanced up in confusion at this question. “Uh… no. Why?” Alexei kept his eyes on the road, but Yuri could tell they were filled with fury and disappointment. Yuri braced himself for whatever Alexei had to say next.

“Apparently a group of paranormal investigator at Zaphias Castle last night broke an antique mirror worth three thousand dollars.”

Yuri’s heart dropped. “Three thousand dollars?!”

“You, of course, weren’t there, were you? You were at your friend’s relative’s house.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Dollar signs still spun through Yuri’s mind. Where the hell did rich people get off having a rotten mirror worth that much?!

“If you were there, this is your final chance to come clean. Tell me the truth and your punishment will be minimal.”

Yuri wasn’t going to fall for that trick. ‘Minimal’ punishment from Alexei was an oxymoron. “There’s nothing to come clean about. I wasn’t at the castle.”

“Then where were you?”

“At the Capel’s place, like I said.” Yuri was grateful for having this conversation in a car, even if it meant he had nowhere to run, so that at least he didn’t have to worry so much about Alexei searching for any sign of defiance on his face to scold him over.

“Why is it, then, that I called Mr. Capel’s home last night, requested to speak to you, and was told you were not available?”

Yuri’s heart throbbed. “No idea. Maybe we were out back.”

“If you thought he would cover for you, you were wrong.”

Yuri tensed with anger - not at Karol’s uncle for caving, but at Alexei for doubtlessly throwing his weight around as chief of police to threaten Mr. Capel into coming clean.

“I thought I had made it clear to you why the castle is off limits.”

Yuri couldn’t help rolling his eyes and he was even more glad that Alexei was looking at the road instead of him. “You made it clear why you think it’s off limits.”

“Then let me be clearer.” Alexei spoke slowly, calmly, but every word dropped with the threat of force. “You will not be going on any more ghost hunts for the foreseeable future. Not to the castle, not to an alleged barn, nowhere. You will not be leaving the house without me at all for the next week. You will be in your room with the lights out by nine. You will not have you laptop in your bedroom. You will not have your phone in your bedroom. Consider yourself under house arrest.”

Indignation rushed through Yuri hard enough to make his ears ring. “What, grounding me like I’m thirteen?”

“As long as you live in my house, you will obey my rules.”

Yuri struggled to keep from yelling, but the anger still slipped out through gritted teeth. “You can’t force me to stay in the house. I’m an adult. That’s wrongful imprisonment.”

“By all means, call the police on me.”

Yuri seethed some more because he knew Alexei was right. He could just imagine calling the police to their boss’ house, and trying to explain to the single officer who showed up that he was being held against his will in his childhood home with all the doors unlocked. He’d look ridiculous and the last thing he wanted was to let Alexei build a background of him crying wolf.

Yuri breathed out some of his anger. “Alright. I get it. I want to go to Flynn’s house tonight, though.”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s Purim. I always spend it with the Scifos.” He hadn’t wanted to originally, but at this point, he'd take anything to get away from Alexei.

“Not when you’re grounded. You’re staying home.”

The anger ramped back up. “You really think this is what Mom would have wanted? For me to skip major holidays?”

“Do not invoke your mother to try to win an argument.”

The hypocrisy didn’t fail to ire Yuri further. As if Alexei hadn’t been using his mom as an excuse for bossing him around since the day she died. “You say that because I’m right. This isn’t about Mom; you just want an excuse to feel like you’re in power. That’s why you became a cop, isn’t it?”

The twitch in Alexei’s arm made Yuri flinch and he was deeply aware that it was only the fact that they were driving that prevented him from getting struck just then. Yuri decided not to egg him on further, in case Alexei’s anger didn’t die by the time they reached the privacy of their house.

Alexei’s response was quietly icy. “I think it will be two weeks of house arrest now. Speak to me that way again, and the consequences will be significantly more severe.”

Yuri’s desire to get the last word in battled his desire for self-preservation. Self-preservation won, and he instead shifted away from Alexei and turned back to his cellphone. He needed to tell the others that he wasn’t going to be able to attend the interview with Catherine after all.

* * *

It took Flynn almost two hours to get home on Monday evening. He’d left his apartment as soon as he got out of class, which meant he was stuck on a bus in rush-hour traffic. That turned into a crowded subway ride, followed by a second bus to get him closer to home. The whole trip was interspersed with daydreams about all the food he was going to fill his growling stomach with after fasting all day.

When he wasn’t dreaming about being rich enough to purchase deodorant for every sweaty dude crushing him on the subway, he replayed his conversation with Estelle earlier. She’d called him during a gap between classes that afternoon to update him on the mirror situation.

“We’re not, technically, at fault,” she’d explained. “They reviewed the security footage, except soon after the séance started, the video feed cuts out. But, there’s no evidence that any of us touched it and when the video returns, we’re all still sitting at the table, so it’s getting listed on insurance as a freak accident.”

“That’s good to know.” Flynn had been anxious about adding the cost of the mirror to his already frightening student loan debt all morning.

“As for continuing the investigation, well, Mr. Dropwart really wasn’t keen on it after the mirror and the chandelier, too.”

“I thought you said the chandelier was officially not our fault?”

“It’s not!” Estelle said quickly. “But, you know, bad timing and all. Pointing that out is how I got us permission to stay. But, he says if we’re going to do this again next weekend, no more bulky equipment set ups, and we have to stay in front of the ropes.”

Flynn sighed. Being restricted to only the tourist avenues of the castle would make investigating more difficult, but it was better than nothing. “Fine. I’ll let the others know. Oh, one more thing - on Thursday, Raven and I are going to be meeting with a women who used to work in the house. Are you interested in joining us?” Yuri’s message earlier had simply said he wouldn’t be able to make it to the meeting without further explanation. Flynn had a bad feeling the explanation involved Alexei in some manner.

“Oh, wow!” The prospect of meeting a former staff member excited Estelle as much as Flynn expected. “That would be wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me.”

With Thursday plans made, Flynn tried to put thoughts of Zaphias Castle aside once he was finally walking up the street to his childhood home. The narrow brick houses were squeezed together on a street that was shady once the leaves grew in. Low iron fences separated the slushy sidewalk from tiny patches of grass in the way of lawns, and further down the road, a handful of children played street hockey on the freshly-salted road. Flynn smiled at their yells and the slaps of their sticks with a hint of nostalgia as he pushed open the gate to his own tiny yard.

He unlocked the front door, trailed his hand over the mezuzah on the door frame, and kicked slush off his boots once inside. “Mom?!”

His mother emerged from the living room with a smile and held her arms out. “Sweetheart.”

Flynn pulled his mother into a hug and kissed her forehead. She was a small woman, and felt even smaller in his arms. He finally let her go and stood back to take in her mousy hair and the dreamy look in the eyes behind her glasses. “How are you, Mom?”

“Fine, dear, I’m fine.” Mom always called him by terms of endearment, and very rarely his name. Flynn had always wondered if she simply couldn’t get used to the name he’d picked, or if she simply couldn’t bear to call him by something other than the girl’s name his dad had picked. Flynn had never had the courage to ask her, in fear of the answer, and decided he should consider himself lucky she at least didn’t use his deadname.

She took him by the elbow and dragged him into the living room. “Come, sit, and tell me all about you.” Flynn had no choice but to follow along and be pushed onto the threadbare couch that was older than he was. He looked her over as she sat across with him and noted with worry the food stain on her skirt. He tried to not make it obvious that he was inspecting the corners of the room for dustballs, or calculating how long the stack of unopened mail had sat on the coffee table. With more than a little guilt, Flynn decided he was going to need to find room in his schedule to come home more often.

She hadn’t always been like this. Flynn remembered her being full of vibrant life when he was young, but then his dad died and everything had sort of fallen apart. Flynn had once told Yuri that it sometimes felt as if both of his parents had died that day. His dad had died all at once in the impact of the collision, and his mom had died in a million tiny ways every day since. Flynn had been eight years old when he lost his dad, and nine when he learned how to clip coupons from the newspaper and walk to the corner store for groceries, because someone had to fill the fridge.

He worried about her while living away from home. He’d strongly considered remaining at home during school so he could look after her, but the commute both ways would have taken so much time out of his day that he really didn’t think he could handle it. If he didn’t know that their old neighbour, Hanks, was also keeping an eye on her, he would have simply put up with it.

Flynn rambled on about his classes and what he’d been up to. He made certain to reassure her that Yuri was doing well. Last December, he’d tried to pass the theatre incident off as a minor accident so as not to worry her, but she had picked up from the way he acted that Yuri’s accident had been serious. When he had finally finished telling her not to worry about himself and that he was confident he had done well on all his midterms, Flynn switched to telling her about what had happened at Zaphias Castle.

He wasn’t sure what to tell her. At first, he kept it to purely the facts, and suggested that ‘some weird things’ had been going on and it was getting ‘a little spooky’. By the time he finished with, “…so Judith decided to hold a séance,” he had no idea what to say next. A lot of potential sentences passed through his mind, until he just said, “Mom… are ghosts real?” That wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. He’d planned the sentence in his head as more conversational, but when he looked into his mom’s face, he had suddenly felt six years old and just wanted his mom to solve the turmoil in his mind.

Mom’s face crinkled into a smile. “Of course, dear. A person’s soul is so much more than their body, and doesn’t die the way the flesh does. Your dad’s spirit is still with us.”

“Yes, I know that. But what about ghosts that you can see? Ghosts that slam doors and make the wind blow indoors?”

“Oh? How very peculiar.”

Flynn leaned forward. “But can that be real? If I saw things like that, is it really a ghost or am I just… I don’t know, going crazy?”

“Of course you’re not crazy, sweetheart. There are spirits around us all the time, but sometimes they are more apparent than others.”

“Why, though? How is that possible? It goes against everything we know about physics and the universe.”

Mom smiled sweetly. “The world is more than just the universe we see, honey. Time doesn’t move in a straight line, you know. It spirals down like a cork screw, and when you’re in one place on the cork screw, you’re connected to everything that came before you on that same location further up. Every year you just circle back around to them again.”

As if Flynn needed a reminder that his mom was unable to move forward. “You mean that ghosts aren’t really ‘here’, we’re just seeing glimpses of them through the past?” Flynn had heard this explanation for ghosts before. It usually applied to visions of ghosts going about daily life with seemingly no idea they were dead. The idea was that the ghost was not a conscious entity, and merely an imprint of a previous time. That idea was comforting, but didn’t mesh with the disturbingly intentional events he’d witnessed.

“In part. More than that, though, it means… that we’re never really as far away from the past as we like to think. It’s all still there, just on the other side of perception. And sometimes… it breaks through.”

Flynn leaned on his knees and thought about it. He’d always said that just because science didn’t currently have explanations for every reported paranormal phenomenon, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t ever. Well, maybe that scientific explanation that would come in the future would be explaining just what ghosts are and how they work.

“That’s why I know your father is still here, just waiting for me to find the right away to get in touch with him.”

Flynn looked up with a cringe. “Mom, no. Please don’t keep calling phone psychics.”

“Don’t worry, dear, I know how to spot a fraud.” She stood up and checked her watch. “We should get going or we’ll be late.”

Flynn wanted to continue pressing his mom about her psychics, but he would be home for the next couple of days and could look into it tomorrow. He didn’t want to start an argument on their way to the synagogue. For tonight, he’d try to put thoughts of Zaphias Castle behind him, even if that really meant it was still right there, never as far away as he would like.


	8. What Lies Beneath

On Thursday afternoon, Flynn sat in the back seat of Raven’s van in the parking lot of a coffee shop across the street from Upper Ilyccia College. The passenger seat was left empty, because Estelle would be here any minute now.

“It’s going to be a nightmare to get out of here,” Flynn said, watching traffic crawl along the packed downtown streets. Upper Ilyccia College was a small square of ivy-covered buildings that had sat in the heart of Zaphias since a time when its early-19th-century style architecture fit in with the rest of downtown. The school was highly selective so he would have been pleased with the recruitment advertisements he’d received for it in high school were it not exclusively for women and highly Christian, two things Flynn didn’t want much to do with. “You should have taken Estelle up on her offer to meet at the subway station uptown.”

“Of course not! What kinda gentlemen doesn’t pick a lady up? Besides, the subway station isn’t crowded with cute college girls.”

Flynn leaned forward between the seats. “What? That’s why you wanted to come down here?”

“Stick with me, Flynn, and this old man will teach you all you need to know to pick up the ladies.” He gave an exaggerated wink.

Flynn tried his best to hold in his grimace. “You know I’m gay, right?”

Raven sighed heavily. “I wish Yuri were here.”

Flynn leaned back and snickered. “I highly doubt Yuri would be on your side right now, either.” Flynn shared Raven’s wish for Yuri, though. The idea of being grounded at the age of twenty-one infuriated him, and he was sure that Yuri’s situation was even worse than he’d let on. All Yuri had said was that he couldn’t get out of the house during the day, but all of them had noticed that Yuri was suddenly absent at night. Flynn was already debating heading over to Yuri’s house with an armload of leftovers from Purim, both because it infuriated him that Yuri hadn’t been allowed to attend and because he remembered packing two lunches during certain weeks in high school when Alexei decided eating more than bread and water was a privilege that Yuri hadn’t earned.

“Oh, there’s Estelle.” Raven rolled down the window - literally, because his van was almost older than Flynn - and waved to her.

Estelle ran across the street and then climbed into the van with a smile. Her backpack slipped to the floor and she leaned around the seat to say, “Hello, Flynn! Hello, Raven! Thank you so much for picking me up.”

“My pleasure, Miss Estelle.”

Flynn was grateful Raven didn’t elaborate on his ulterior motive to come to her school.

As expected, getting out the parking lot and then fighting downtown traffic was a nightmare. By the time they reached the Williams’ house in one of the small satellite towns that had been gobbled up by the Zaphias metro sprawl a few decades ago, they were ten minutes late. Flynn jumped out of the van and ran to the door in his urgency to arrive. It was an old house, with white paint peeling off wooden siding. Flynn stood on a covered porch and rang the bell. Behind him, Raven and Estelle crunched over sidewalk salt on the path up to the door.

The front door opened and woman with curly grey hair and a lined face smiled at him. “You must be Yuri.”

“Ah, actually, my name is Flynn.” He stuck out his hand to shake it. “And these are my friends Raven and Estelle. I’m sorry, Yuri was unable to make it today.”

“Oh, such a shame. Well, come in then, dears.”

They followed Catherine into a cluttered house that smelled of mothballs and cats. Flynn slipped off his slush-covered shoes and followed her into a kitchen. Pots and pans piled up in the sink, but the plate of chocolate chip cookies she held out smelled delicious.

“Please help yourself. Mum and I don’t get visitors often.”

She left the plate on the crowded kitchen island and went to the doorway to the living room. While Flynn grabbed a cookie, Catherine said, “Mum? The nice young man I told you about is here.” She turned back to the others and motioned for them to come forward.

In the living room, Catherine’s mother sat in a winged armchair with a plaid blanket over her legs. Half-moon glasses sat on a face like a wizened apple, and her wispy white hair stuck close to her head. Catherine picked up an overweight ginger cat, which mewed in indignation, to clear space on the couch across from her.

Flynn sat on the edge of the couch, hands folded on his lap, and said, “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Mrs. Williams.”

“McIntyre,” the old woman said in voice with more energy than Flynn had expected. “Williams was my son-in-law’s name. But you can call me Mary.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mary,” Estelle said. “My name is Estelle and I work in Zaphias Castle.”

“I bet you don’t scrub as many floors as I did when I worked there,” Mary said with a smile that crinkled around her eyes.

Estelle giggled. “Probably not.”

“Now, what do you kids want to know about the castle? You look a little old for a school assignment.”

“Hey, I might be in university,” Raven whined, clearly put-out that even a centenarian was calling him old.

“Oh?” Mary tilted her head at him. “Are you going back to school, dear?”

“Well… no.”

Flynn resisted the urge to roll his eyes at Raven and pushed the conversation along. “Actually, we’re interested in the stories of the haunting at the castle. We’d like to find out the truth about what went on in there, and is still going on.”

“Ah….” Mary’s smile faded and she nodded slowly. “Yes, many people have been interested in the ghosts of Zaphias Castle over the years.”

Estelle asked, “Did you ever think the castle was haunted when you were working there, Mary?”

“Haunted? Hm….” Her eyes drifted up, as if she would find the past there. “How about I tell you my story, dears?”

Estelle beamed. “We would love to hear it.”

“I started working there when I was fifteen years old,” Mary said. “It was a good job, for the time. That was during the Depression, so I felt lucky to have any job at all, let alone one that provided room and board in such a nice house.” She smiled at the warm memory playing before her eyes. “That was after the days of grand estates and households, but the smaller staff became my little family. There were four of us maids on staff, and we answered to Mrs. Hallewell, the housekeeper. Oh, but she was a fierce woman. Heaven help the parlour maid who left a spot of dust on the windowsill! Still, she was like a mother to us.” Mary looked away from her reminiscing to focus on the trio across from her. “I didn’t have family of my own, you see. My father was a drunk and my mother died of the flu when I was still a baby. Mrs. Hallewell took me under her wing when I had no one else to turn to.”

Flynn shared her smile. “She sounds like an impressive woman.”

“Yes. At the time, I thought she must have been ancient, but she couldn’t have been a day over sixty - a sprightly young thing, eh?” Every time Mary laughed, her wizened face crinkled up so much that her eyes were hidden. “Always did see her as a role model, even after I left the service. She never talked about her past much, but the other maids and I carefully pieced together what gossip we could find. She’d come from England as a young girl, arriving all alone. That’s why she looked out for us girls, I think - she saw herself in us. There had been some kind of falling out with her family, possibly a baby, though she never mentioned a child when I knew her, nor a man - and for that, I say she was quite wise.” With that, she let out another laugh.

“She must have been married, though,” Estelle said. “Or else she would be Miss Hallewell.”

Mary smiled fondly. “Oh, that’s just how it was in those days. No self-respecting housekeeper would call herself miss. I can’t imagine Mrs. Hallewell ever marrying, though there were plenty of rumours among us girls about her knowing how to brew love potions.”

“Love potions?” Raven asked with curiosity.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Flynn replied flatly without looking at him.

“Some of the girls, well….” Mary leaned forward a bit and said in a theatrical whisper, “Some of them said she was a witch, and had been run out of town in the old country for casting spells.”

Flynn shared a quick glance with Raven while Estelle between them sat enraptured. Patterns on the floor designed to repel witches danced through Flynn’s mind.

“Do you think she really was a witch?” Estelle asked eagerly. “Did you ever see her do magic?”

“Of course not, dear. Now, what did you want to know about the castle specifically? The haunting?”

“That right,” Estelle said. “Did you suspect it was haunting when you lived there?”

She leaned back in her chair with pursed lips. “We didn’t think it was haunted, but we knew… something was happening to the girls.”

“Something?” Flynn asked. “Can you elaborate?”

“The disappearances, I mean. I’m sure you know about them. We weren’t blind back then, you know. We knew that girls were going missing. We always tried to stick together, especially in the evenings, because it was when a girl was off by herself that she might never come back. But, there were only four of us and it was a big house to maintain, so we couldn’t stick together all the time.”

Estelle listened with heartbroken eyes. “How awful…. You said Mrs. Hallewell was protective of you. Did she know anything about what was going on?”

Mary rubbed her fingers on the arm of the chair and thought for a moment before answering. “She… had her suspicions. We all suspected someone in the household was doing it. Whenever a girl vanished, the butler would collect her things. I don’t know what he did with them, but the rumour was that he wrote the girl’s family saying she’d met a boy and run off. No one ever called the police.”

“Couldn’t one of you have called them?” Flynn asked.

Mary gave a short laugh. “A parlour maid call the police to her master’s mansion? And be kicked out on her rear in the middle of the Depression?”

“Ah… right.” Flynn regretted his question.

“Ya don’t have any idea who was doin’ the snatchin’, do ya?”

Mary hesitated at Raven’s question and then said, “No. I do not. One of the male staff members, possibly.”

Flynn wondered about this. If it was one of the male staff members, then the disappearances would have stopped when he left. Instead, they’d continued into the future when nobody lived there at all. Again he considered the possibility the Nathaniel had awoken something - something that preyed upon his household, eventually took him as well, and lingered in the house long after his death. Flynn pictured the shadow that had loomed behind him during the séance and shuddered.

“What about the marks carved into the floor in the master bedroom?” Estelle asked. “Did you ever see them?”

“Marks?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Witches’ marks,” Raven supplied, still keen to get credit for this tidbit of knowledge. “Meant ta repel witches or evil spirits. Nathaniel had them carved inta the floor around his bed.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” She shook her head. “Never saw ‘em.”

Flynn stared at her for a few seconds and then nodded slowly. “I see. Well, I think that’s everything we wanted to ask you about. Can I give you my phone number in case you remember anything?”

Leaving the house was a difficult task of avoiding Catherine’s invitations to stay for supper and they only managed it on the condition they each take a bag of cookies. Raven wordlessly handed his bag to Estelle once they were in the van. Before pulling out of the driveway, Flynn scooted to the middle seat so they could have a short conference on what they had learned.

“She was lying,” Flynn said first. “At the end, about the witches’ marks.”

“Are you sure?” Estelle asked.

“She must have been. She said herself that there were only four maids cleaning the entire house, and that they were all very close. Even if she never cleaned the master bedroom herself, one of them would have at some point pulled up the carpet to sweep and seen the marks, and I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have gossipped about them.”

“You’re probably right,” Raven said, “but what would be her motive for lyin’ about even knowin’ about them?”

Flynn slowly shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I got the feeling she knew more about the disappearances than she said, too,” Estelle said. “It’s like she was covering for someone, but why would she cover for someone who kidnapped her friends?”

“’Kidnapped’,” Raven scoffed. “I think we all know those girls didn’t leave the house alive.”

Estelle winced. “Where did they go, though? We’ve never found any bodies, and the police searched the whole house after Anya disappeared.”

Flynn thought about the secret passage in the master bedroom that had only been found in the eighties. “Maybe there are more secret areas in the house that we haven’t found yet.”

Raven turned the ignition and pulled out of the driveway. “Fat load of luck we’ll have findin’ ‘em if we’re banned from crossing the ropes now.”

* * *

It had been a long week. Yuri hadn’t felt this isolated and cooped up since his month in the hospital, but at least then he’d been in too much pain to want to leave his bed anyway. For the entire week, he’d had nothing to do but watch TV or video games after Alexei started taking his laptop and phone to work. He’d been able to get in touch with his friends for three hours every evening, when Alexei set it up on the kitchen counter and let him use it with the screen in view. It was humiliating. This was how he’d been punished when he was fourteen, and now he was a grown-ass adult with supervised internet hours. More than once, he’d gone to the front door, stood on the step and stared at the street. The idea of just walking away until he reached a new life was tempting.

Where would he go, though? It was nice enough to imagine leaving, but leaping without a landing in sight was a great way to crash and burn. He still had no job nor job prospects, he still had a mountain of debt, and he’d be walking away without his phone and computer. He wouldn’t even have any of his legal documents, because Alexei had those filed away somewhere and wouldn’t divulge their location.

On Friday night, Yuri sat on the edge of his bed and listened intently for the sound of snoring. During his window of allowed socializing, he’d been updated on what Flynn, Raven, and Estelle had learned from Mary and knew they were going back to Zaphias Castle tonight to see what else they could find. There was no way Yuri was missing out on that, but had told them to go ahead without him and he’d sneak out when he could.

Alexei had retired to his room an hour ago. There were no reassuring snores, but Alexei didn’t always snore so that wasn’t a guarantee he was awake. Yuri would have to chance it. He pushed the door open quietly and then eased it shut. Yuri was well-experienced with how to open and shut his bedroom door as quietly as possible. Climbing out the window would have been his first option, but he wouldn’t try that until he at least got the cast off his arm next week. At least he was getting better at stairs. He still clung to the railing and took them slowly, but every day the walk downstairs got a little bit easier. There was no chance of grabbing his phone, which was imprisoned in Alexei’s bedroom, but he had his wallet and enough bus fare to get to the castle. Yuri opened the front door just enough to slip out, and then gently pushed it shut. The crisp night air tasted like freedom.

Yuri didn’t relax until he was out of view of the house and waiting at the bus stop a five minute walk away. He still had to worry about sneaking back in without being heard, but he could deal with that when the time came. The bus was mostly empty at this time of night, so he was able to sit in undisturbed quiet all the way across town to the castle. By the time he got off the bus, it was nearly midnight.

He was cold and tired when he reached the front door. Raven’s van sat in the parking lot below, so he wasn’t surprised to find the door already unlocked. Yuri walked in and was just about to call out when he caught a brush of movement leaving the hall. “Estelle?” It had looked like the flap of a dress moving down the corridor.

Yuri followed. Even though he doubted either Judy or Rita would be wearing a dress, he said, “Judy? Rita?” Around the corner from the entry hall, he stopped when he saw the door to the study hanging open, inviting. “Uh.” He pulled out the flashlight he’d brought just in case and stepped into the dark study. He flipped the light switch, but nothing happened. The back of his mind played memories of a dark theatre, scratches on the outlet, and a strangling cord in the dark. Yuri sucked in a deep breath to prove that he could and shone the flashlight’s beam around the room.

The door to the hidden stairs had been left open. The others must have come this way before going upstairs, Yuri told himself and almost believed it. He stood in the middle of the moonlit room, planning to enter the stairway but holding back for… some reason. That reason was probably the voice whispering in his ear, so quietly it might just be his imagination, the mantle. Go to the mantle. The mantle. The mantle.

When Yuri approached the carved stone fireplace, he felt an uptick of pressure as if someone joining him in the room was egging him on. What was he supposed to do here? The mantle was made of polished stone, with miniature Greek-style columns on either side. Flynn would probably know what the curly tops of the pillars were called, but Yuri called them ‘circular’. Across the top was a slab of slick rose marble. In the middle, a rectangle of polished white stone showed carvings of men in togas, and evenly spaced on either side were embossed circles with floral patterns. Yuri ran his hand over the smooth stone, wondering what he was even doing here.

His skin crawled under an unseen stare. There was something to find here, and someone in the room was watching him intently to make sure he did. Yuri leaned close, inspecting every whorl and swoop of the stone. He wished the house had better heating because the room was freezing and his fingers felt stiff. His face inches from the mantle, he noticed a tiny gap, no wider than a hair, between the flat marble slab and the embossed circle on the left. He angled his light directly at the edge of the circle to see more clearly. He compared it to the other circle, which stuck seamlessly out from the stone, and confirmed that this one definitely looked like it had been attached separately.

It was just small enough that he could fit his hand around it, thumb on the bottom and fingers along the top groove. Not sure what he expected, he twisted. At first nothing happened, but he put more force into it and the stone disc twisted like a knob. It moved slowly and he felt dull clicks like gears turning. When it stopped moving, it had rotated about ninety degrees clockwise. Yuri dropped his hand and suddenly wondered if he had just broken something worth considerably more than three thousand dollars.

Looking around the room, nothing seemed to have changed. Yuri stepped away from the mantle, wondering what had come over him. He shook his head and moved to the hidden stairs to meet up with his friends. Estelle would probably tell him that the knob on the mantle was some antique fire safety valve or something like that. Yuri entered the stairway, turned to head up, and stared at a young woman halfway up the steps, pointing at the wall.

Yuri shone the flashlight directly on her, but after blinking, the apparition was gone. Yuri blinked furiously as his heart tried to calm down. The girl had been so faint that he was almost able to convince himself it had just been a shadow. The human brain was excellent at finding human shapes and faces in random patterns, and Yuri knew that was an explanation for many ghost sightings. Was the human mind prone to imagining the ruffled frill of a dress, though? Was it prone to making up distinctly feminine silhouettes that disappeared after blinking, when there was nothing in the room to cast a shadow?

Yuri gripped the railing and stared defiantly into the shadows as he climbed the stairs. There was no such thing as ghosts. Still, when he reached the midway point, he paused and turned to the wooden panelling on the wall right where the girl-who-hadn’t-been-there had pointed. Not pointed. She wasn’t real.

The walls in here were made of vertical panels of polished wood. Yuri pressed his hand against the wall, not sure what he was looking for. It seemed solid enough, until his push gained some upward movement and suddenly the panel under his hand shifted an inch into the ceiling. The plank of wood served as a latch, as when he pushed it up, a section of the wall around a metre wide swung inward to reveal an alcove. His nose tickled as dust filled the air and his flashlight illuminated a wooden space just large enough for two, maybe three people to stand, draped in cobwebs.

Two parallel ropes ran from floor to ceiling. Yuri tucked his flashlight under his arm to tug on one and watched the wooden box shift down before it got caught on the door that had opened into it. It was some kind of human-sized dumbwaiter, or a rudimentary hand-powered elevator. Based on where the study was positioned in relation to the actual elevator, Yuri guessed that the shaft for this dumbwaiter was attached to the main elevator shaft. They might have been constructed at the same time, with this smaller one bricked off to keep it hidden. He tugged on the other rope to bring it up again, but it wouldn’t go any higher. It had been designed to take someone between the study and the basement only.

Yuri put one foot into the box and pushed, testing his weight. It creaked, but held up, so he stepped fully into the box. He scooted to the back, trying not to actually press his shirt into the cobwebs, and closed the door. The door was clever, Yuri had to admit. Fifty years of inspecting the castle, and no one had found it. Some people might have noticed that this section of wall had a slightly wide crack between panels than others, and some people might have noticed the disc on the mantle was loose, but you had to know about both to open the door. Yuri tried to picture what was happening in the walls and imagined some sort of lever and cord system running through the floor so that the wooden panel wouldn’t shift unless it had been unlocked by the knob on the fireplace. Estelle said the hidden stairway had been built purely for the aesthetic of a secret passage despite being in constant use by servants, but someone had seriously wanted to keep this elevator hidden.

Yuri tugged on the rope to start going down. Whoever wanted it to stay hidden was about to have their day ruined.

He moved slowly. He’d repositioned his flashlight into the hand of his broken arm, so it shone at the ceiling at an awkward angle. With his good hand, he slowly lowered himself down the shaft. Every creak and squeak made him tense, expecting to plunge into the depths of the shaft as soon as the rope broke. If that happened, he knew he would die because there was no way he had the luck to survive a fall like that twice. After a few minutes, he realized he must have reached the basement by now, but the elevator kept going. He was going deeper underground, to a basement level that wasn’t even on the blueprints.

He’d been staring at crumbling brick all the way down, until the wall in front of him suddenly opened up to a hallway. Yuri gave one last pull on the rope and the box hit the ground with a thunk. He took the flashlight in his good hand and shone it straight ahead. The light cut through darkness thicker than water to reveal a brick wall ten feet away. The elevator let him out in a hallway that smelled thickly of dust and sent goosebumps down his arm. Cobwebs hung in the corners and rat droppings sat in little piles along the wall. He doubted this corridor had seen light or warmth in over fifty years.

The only thing of interest in the hallway was a door on the left side. Yuri stepped out of the elevator and approached it slowly. Grit crunched under his boots and he struggled not to sneeze on the dust filling the air. The walls were made from blocks of stone, and the wooden door sat on dust-encrusted hinges. Cobwebs stretched and broke as it croaked open. A burst of stale air hit his face and Yuri cringed. Then he shone his light into the room and his cringe turned to a shock of revulsion.

Skeletons. The room was about ten feet by ten feet and filled with skeletons, piled on the floor like discarded garbage. The limbs of those on top tangled into the rib cages of those below. Dust clung to scraps of fabric within the pile that must have once been clothes. Yuri’s flashlight panned across the ghastly scene as disgust roiled in his belly until he paused on the skeleton closest to the door, which lay on top of the others. The blue sweater it wore hadn’t completely faded with time and supported a small amulet from a chain around the neck. Yuri couldn’t make out the details, but he recognized the shape of an upside down palm.

Yuri was only faintly aware that he was shaking as he wheezed out, “Mom….”

He twisted away from the door and took a few steps away to catch his breath. That was a mistake, because he started coughing as soon as he took deep breaths of the dusty air. When he finally could breathe again, he gasped, “What the fuck is this place?”

He returned to the elevator in a haze of fury. His body rose back to the study, but his mind was still trapped in that horrible little room with his mother’s remains. A litany of profanity sang through his head and his hand shook as it dragged the rope. He pushed against the door and stumbled out onto the stairs like emerging from scuba diving. Who had built the elevator? Who had put those bodies there? Who had left his mom there? He shook with outrage at what someone had done to her, but he didn’t even try to calm down because he knew that if he let go of his anger, there would be nothing left to hold him together.

Yuri clambered up the stairs and emerged on the second floor hallway. “Hello!? Guys! Hey!”

Something banged on the floor above him and he had no idea if it was Karol dropping something in surprise or a ghost saying hello. He drifted toward the balcony that overlooked the entry hall, light-headed and feeling sick. How many bodies had been down there? How did they die? Were they dead before they were left there, or had someone locked his mother in a room full of corpses and left her to starve to death on a pile of skeletons? He wanted to throw up.

“Yuri!” Karol ran down the stairs from the third floor. “Hi! When did you get here?!”

Karol ran to him, the rest of the group close behind. Estelle thought to hit the second floor lights, which turned on without issue. Yuri leaned against the banister above the entry hall, trying to make sense of the living, smiling friends in front of him and the pile of corpses stuck before his eyes. Had she suffered? Was this what happened to the maids? Why would someone do that?

“Are you ok?” Estelle asked.

Flynn jumped straight to, “What happened?”

Judith, right beside him now, plucked cobwebs off his shoulder. “Where were you?”

Yuri rubbed his face and shook his head to try to jolt himself to his senses. “There’s… I found a hidden elevator. In the wall of the hidden staircase.”

Estelle gasped. “Really!? How did you find it?”

“There’s a secret switch on the mantle. You have to turn it to get the door to unlatch.”

“How’d ya figure that out?” Raven asked.

Yuri shrugged. “Lucky impulse, I guess.”

Raven shared a look with Judy that Yuri was too distracted to try to decipher.

Estelle asked, “But where did it go?”

“Down,” he said simply. “Past the basement. All the way down to a hallway underground.”

“No kidding?” Rita stared at him. “What was down there?”

Mom had said she’d be fine. She’d hugged him goodnight and put him to bed, and then someone murdered her and stuffed her body in a mass grave. How had they killed her? Had it been painful? “Bodies.” He looked to Flynn, not wanting to see Karol’s face. “Lots of them. I… think I found everyone who’s disappeared.”

The weight of his discovery pressed down on the group, smothering any commentary. Judith was the first one to rise above it and quietly ask, “Your mother?”

Yuri just nodded.

“Shit,” Flynn whispered and closed his eyes.

“W-what do we do?” Karol asked, hugging himself.

There was another long pause at that. Brave Vesperia was used to investigating, but they’d never found anything more serious than a raccoon nest.

Finally, Raven said, “We call the police.” He nodded slowly, confidence in the answer building. “Yeah. This ain’t just a paranormal investigation anymore. Ya find a body, ya call the police. It’s gotta be reported.”

“What do we even tell them?” Yuri looked at him and found a streak of sarcasm to help him get through the shock. “’Hi, 911? We found a pile of skeletons in a haunted castle, can you come check it out?’”

Raven shrugged. “Uh… basically, yeah. Don’t worry about it; I’ll make the call. Meanwhile, lets all go outside and get some fresh air.”

* * *

Later, Yuri sat on the steps of the portico with Flynn. So far, Flynn hadn’t said a word. They’d all shuttled out of the castle and while Raven talked to the police on his phone, the others stood in a tight group, looking up at the castle and talking in low voices. Flynn had broken off from the group and silently slid into place on the steps beside Yuri. Yuri didn’t want to tell him how much he appreciated the silent comfort, and told himself it was just the body heat on the cold night he really needed.

“It’s weird,” Yuri finally said, still staring at the pavement far ahead of him. “I always knew she was dead. I’ve known for ten years. Seeing proof of it shouldn’t shake me this much.”

“I think it would shake anyone.” Flynn had his hands folded on his lap and matched Yuri’s attention on a distant pile of melting snow. “My mom told me my dad was dead. I believed her, but it wasn’t until I saw his body at the funeral that it really… hit me. For me, knowing he was dead and seeing the proof only took a few days. For you, it took ten years… but I’m sure it still hit you as hard as seeing him in the casket hit me.”

“Hm.” Yuri shivered as he watched a police car and a handful of unmarked vehicles pull into the parking lot down the steps. “You know what really bothers me? All this time, I thought her death was an accident. That she just… slipped, or wasn’t careful enough. But you don’t accidentally end up on a pile of skeletons in a secret room. Someone did this to her.” The rage this thought filled him with helped with the cold.

Flynn suddenly grabbed his knee. “Yuri.”

“I’m going to find out who it was and - what?”

“Alexei.”

Sure enough, Alexei was walking up the stairs with a few uniformed officers and plain-clothes detectives. “Fuck. I’m dead.” Yuri briefly considered sneaking away before he was spotted, but it was no use. The police were going to want to talk to the person who found the bodies, and the rest of his friends couldn’t even describe exactly how to find the hidden elevator. If he had been thinking at all clearly, he would have expected Alexei to be here. A while pile of bodies in a secret room was big news, and of course everyone knew the chief’s wife had disappeared in this building. Of course they would have called to inform him of the discovery as soon as possible. Of course Alexei would come out here in the middle of the night if it involved his wife’s murder.

And of course Alexei’s face was carefully calm when he spotted Yuri sitting on the steps. If he was surprised to see Yuri, his face didn’t show it. Yuri wondered if Raven had given enough details over the phone to identify him, or if Alexei had checked Yuri’s room before leaving, found it empty, and made a logical conclusion.

“Good evening.” Alexei stopped in front of the steps with one of the detectives by his side.

Yuri looked up at him levelly, refusing to show guilt. He didn’t actually feel guilty about coming, but he preferred to think it was guilt that he was making, rather than fear. “Evening.”

“Flynn, please excuse us. I’d like to speak with Yuri alone.”

“Ah… yes, sir.” Flynn gave Yuri’s knee a reassuring squeeze, stood, and gave Yuri a hand to help him up. He grimaced quickly, and left to join the others.

“This is Leblanc.” Alexei motioned at the detective. “He will be in charge of the investigation here. Please explain to both of us what you found.”

Yuri relayed his story with much more clarity than he had earlier. He didn’t let his voice shake as he described the pile of bones he’d found below.

When he finished, Leblanc asked, “But how did you know to turn the dial on the mantle?”

Yuri shrugged. He had no way to explain a sudden compulsion and a voice whispering in his brain. The last thing he needed was to give Alexei an excuse to have him declared mentally incompetent and in need of a permanent guardian. “Just luck.”

“I see….” Leblanc stroked his moustache. “And was there any sign of violence?”

Yuri stared at him for a second. “You mean other than the pile of dead bodies?”

Alexei gave him an annoyed look. “What Detective Leblanc means, Yuri, is if there was any indication of how the bodies died. In other words, blood, smashed bones, weapons.”

Yuri shook his head. “I didn’t look that close.”

“Understandable,” Alexei said. “Leblanc, I want all the bodies brought up and identified. I trust Yuri’s identification of Anya, but of course we will need official confirmation.”

“Yes, sir!” Leblanc saluted and left to join his colleagues chatting with the others.

Yuri watched Leblanc leave with a pang of regret; there went his last witness. Alexei moved toward him and Yuri braced himself, but was surprised when Alexei wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him into a half hug.

“Are you alright?”

“Uh… yeah.” Yuri couldn’t un-tense.

“Good. What you found tonight must have been a profound shock.”

“It… was surprising, yeah.”

“Finding her remains couldn’t have been easy for you, but in the long run, I believe we will both feel better with closure. Already, I… almost feel that I can finally close a chapter of my life. Once we’ve determined exactly what happened, she can finally rest in peace.”

“Right.”

Then Alexei’s grip tightened, holding him firmly and digging his fingers into Yuri’s shoulder until it hurt. Ah, there it was. Yuri refused to react to the pain in his shoulder.

“Furthermore… if you ever come back to Zaphias Castle, I will call the Dean of Admissions at Aspio University and advise that Flynn’s application be rejected.”

“What!?” Yuri tried to twist to face Alexei, but the grip was too strong and held him in place. “This has nothing to do with Flynn. Leave him out of it.”

“Indeed. That young man has a promising future as a lawyer…. It would be a shame if he lost it thanks to your reckless and defiant behaviour.”

“Punish me all you want, but don’t you dare try to interfere with Flynn’s goals.”

Alexei squeezed, crushing Yuri’s shoulder hard enough to bruise. “Do not use that tone with me, nor tell me what to do. If you won’t stay away from the castle for your own sake, perhaps you will do it for the sake of your friend.”

Alexei finally released his grip and Yuri pulled away from him. “Stay out of Flynn’s life,” Yuri growled.

“Do as you’re told and I will. Now go sit in the car and wait for me to drive you home.”

Yuri glowered back. “I’ll wait with Flynn.”

Alexei pulled out his cell phone. “Wait in the car or I will call and leave a message right now.”

Yuri stared at the phone and then he stared at Flynn. Alexei didn’t bluff. His pride wasn’t worth Flynn’s future, so he clenched his teeth to keep from saying something that would push Alexei to act and stormed off toward the car.


	9. Poltergeist

On Sunday afternoon, Flynn walked to the coffee shop around the block from the university and found Judith, Raven, Rita, Karol, and Estelle already gathered around a table. “Sorry I’m late.” He dragged a chair to the head of the booth and settled in. “I was studying and lost track of time.” Zaphias Castle had distracted him from his studies for too long already. Last week he’d also missed classes because of Purim and meeting with Mary had cut into his study hours as well. He didn’t blame Sodia for looking at him skeptically when he said he was meeting Brave Vesperia this afternoon, but at least this was just supposed to be a short meeting and they’d planned it close to his school to help him out.

“It’s ok,” Karol said with a moustache of whipped cream from his hot chocolate. “We were just talking about the news.”

“Is it still bad?” Flynn asked with a frown. He’d locked himself in his room to study and avoided the internet beyond the library website all day. Yesterday morning, he’d checked the group chat to see Karol and Estelle yelling about being in the newspaper, but he’d muted it so he could study for once. The only person he had consistently checked on for messages was Yuri, but he’d heard nothing from him since Friday night. This meant either Yuri was feeling awful after the discovery and hiding in his room, or else Alexei had banned him from communication devices entirely. Either way, Flynn worried.

Raven shrugged. “Oh, ya know, just a pile of corpses in a secret passage under the city’s biggest landmark. That sorta thing tends ta dominate the news.”

“There were a total of eighteen bodies found,” Judith said. “At least, that’s what the most recent article said. It was a bit of a mess sorting out the remains, I imagine, if they were all in a big heap. Many of them seem to have been there for decades.”

“Have they confirmed if it really was Anya Yuri found?” Flynn asked.

“They haven’t said,” Rita answered. “The articles can’t help mentioning that the chief of police’s wife disappeared there ten years ago, and the fact that Yuri is the one who found the bodies is in all of them, but there’s only theorizing at this point about the identities.”

“Damn….” Flynn almost hoped Alexei had cut Yuri off from the internet just to keep him from reading news articles playing up his family trauma for page views.

“Our Patreon got a big surge in activity, though,” Karol said. “The article that first broke the news said that the discovery was by Brave Vesperia, so we’ve suddenly got a lot of new backers. A lot of journalists have emailed, too, asking for statements but I haven’t replied.”

“That’s smart,” Flynn said. “I think we’d be better off avoiding the media.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Karol said. “A lot of people have asked us to post evidence from the Castle investigation, too, but I think we should do what we normally do and hold it all until we’re ready to post a compilation at the end.”

“I agree,” Judith said. “Besides, I think I would rather let all of this die down before we post any of our more… curious clips. I’ve already looked through some of our old videos and found quite a few new comments calling us frauds.”

Flynn considered the tape from the séance and automatically nodded. Even he didn’t know how he felt about that and he actually trusted that it hadn’t been staged. “What about the Castle itself, Estelle? What’s going on there?”

She fiddled with her drink that was hidden under a mountain of whipped cream. “Oh, well, it’s closed for now. It’s being treated as a crime scene so no one is allowed in. It’s nice to get a break from work, I guess.”

“Any idea how long it will be closed for?” Rita asked.

Estelle shook her head. “Mr. Dropwart said to expect at least a week, maybe? He’s just hoping we can open again before summer hours start.”

“I wonder if they’ll find any more hidden rooms,” Karol said thoughtfully. “Now that they know how to find that one.”

“Seems unlikely,” Rita said. “That one was tricky because it had two steps to open it in two different rooms. There’s gotta be a thousand little knobs and carving throughout the castle to search. Even if they were trying to find more, they’d have no idea where to start.”

“That’s true….” Estelle swirled her straw around her drink. “How did Yuri find that elevator anyway? Flynn, did he say anything else to you?”

“Hm? No. He was very quiet Friday night and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Yuri must have very good luck,” Estelle said. When everyone stared at her for a second and laughed at the concept of Yuri being lucky, she went on, “I mean, he found that hidden compartment in the desk, too. He seems to be very good at finding things.”

“Actually….” Raven folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “Judy and I have been talkin’ ‘bout that. We think somethin’s goin’ on with Yuri.”

“Something?” Flynn frowned with concern. “What sort of something?”

“Not a bad something,” Judith said quickly to assuage his nerves. She frowned with a tilt of the head. “Though, I don’t think he’s going to like it.”

* * *

Yuri visited his doctor for what was hopefully the last time on Wednesday afternoon. He watched with anticipation as his cast was sawed off at long long. As it was pulled away, the smell of dead skin hit him and he wrinkled his nose, but it was worth it to feel fresh air on his arm again.

“Stretch it for me,” the doctor said once it was free.

Yuri sat on the edge of the exam table and stretched it out. After more than three months of immobility, it had grown skinny and pale. He looked forward to adding arm exercises to his physical therapy sessions to get it back into shape.

“I’m afraid I can’t do much about the scarring.” The doctor held his elbow gently and pointed at the gnarly line of raised skin along his elbow and outer arm.

“It’s fine.” Yuri smiled a bit as he flexed his arm, watching the scar twist and stretch. “It looks cool.”

“Really? Most people try to diminish the appearance of scars.”

Yuri rubbed his elbow. “Weak. Scars are proof you survived some shit. I like it.”

“Huh. Well, sorry to disappoint you, then, but I want you to wear a brace that will cover it for the next few weeks.”

Yuri sighed. He should have known better than to think he was home free.

Despite the snug black brace clinging to his arm on his way out, Yuri was in a good mood. At least he could bend his arm again, and a weight had been lifted from his shoulders now that he was rid of the sling. Then, he felt that weight settle onto him again as he watched Alexei pay the receptionist for the cost of the brace. It wouldn’t be much, but this small fee was just one more reminder of the mountain of debt he owed Alexei.

Then they left, and Yuri slumped into the seat for the drive home. The was the first time he’d left the house since going to physical therapy on Monday, and before that it had been the night at the Castle. He hated feeling like a dog, but he perked up at car rides because at least it meant he could leave the house. Now they were heading home for him to spend the rest of the day lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

Alexei interrupted Yuri’s misery to say, “You might be interested to know that your mother’s remains have been positively identified.”

“Yeah. I already knew it was her.”

“I will be arranging a proper burial once the body is released.”

“Fantastic.” Yuri should care. He knew he should, and he knew he was supposed to. Burials were a big deal, right? Treating the deceased’s body with respect and reverence was important. It was his mom and he should care where her bones went.

Except he didn’t. Now that he had gotten over the gut-wrenching shock of finding his mom’s remains, he came to the conclusion that the skeleton he had found had not really, not in any important sense, been his mother. All he’d found was a pile of bones that Mom had once used, but everything that made her, well, her \- her words, her smile, her firm hugs, the way she’d looked at him - was gone. A body was just stuff, and he didn’t really care what happened to the stuff now that Mom wasn’t using it anymore.

What he cared about was what had happened to Mom when she was still alive. “Have they determined a cause of death?”

Alexei stared at the road and mulled over an answer. Yuri got the sense that the answer Alexei finally provided was only part of what he actually knew. “We believe this was a homicide. The other remains are believed to belong to the other people who have disappeared in the vicinity of the castle. Fourteen of them were clearly around a century old - 10 females, four males. Based on clothing and toolboxes found discarded in the room, we believe at least three of the males were construction workers who built the hidden room and were presumably killed to keep the secret.”

Yuri creased his brow and stared out the window. Poor bastards. “So, they died a hundred years ago. Mom died ten years ago. How’d they both wind up down there?” Yuri really hoped the police had an answer better than the one he already had: that whoever or whatever had killed the maids a hundred years ago was still there.

“The current theory is that a transient found the hidden room and squatted in the castle for a number of years. They may have been inspired by the murders they uncovered.”

That answer wasn’t satisfying enough. There were too many holes, and the deaths too spaced out. Besides, it didn’t explain why Yuri had seen the ghost of a young woman - perhaps a murdered maid - direct him to the elevator. Assuming, of course, that he really did see that… and he wasn’t comfortable believing that yet.

“On another topic,” Alexei said with an edge that made Yuri brace himself, “now that your arm is healed, it’s time to begin seriously considering your university plans. Have you thought about?”

“Oh yeah, loads.” Yuri fought to avoid rolling his eyes.

“Have you reached any conclusions?”

“Yeah - useless waste of money, I’d say.” Yuri kept his tone light, though he didn’t have much hope of Alexei keeping the conversation casual.

“It is only a waste of money if you waste it. Focus on your studies and don’t be lazy. You’ll be starting school next winter term, so decide what you want to study or shall choose for you.”

“How about a major in underwater basket weaving?”

“It is this flippant attitude that caused you to drop out the first time.”

Yuri raised his eyebrows and tried to joke, “I thought it was me being naturally stupid?”

“You’re only stupid because you don’t apply yourself.”

“Ah. Right.” Yuri scowled at passing cars. “Hey, completely unrelated to all that, my friends want to see me. I think they’re worried you shipped me off to a gulag in Siberia and want proof that I’m still alive. Might be nice to see them before they get a manhunt launched for me.”

That had been a calculated remark. He watched Alexei’s face carefully to see if it would work. What Alexei was doing to him was illegal, and the reason he got away with it was because he controlled the police in Zaphias. If he pushed it too far, though…. There were things even the chief of police couldn’t get away with, and Yuri hoped Alexei didn’t feel like pushing those limits.

“That is… agreeable. They can visit you at home tomorrow evening.”

Evening, after Alexei got home from work, of course. He couldn’t let Yuri have fun unsupervised, after all. A sarcastic comment rose in Yuri’s throat, but he fought it down because if it escaped, the chance to see his friends was off. “Great. I’ll let them know.”

* * *

Yuri met his friends at the front door when they arrived the next day. The whole group piled in with a chorus of greetings.

“Yuri!” Estelle gushed with a big smile. “Your arm!”

Yuri glanced at his left arm and gasped. “Holy shit, there’s two of them.”

Confused, Estelle babbled, “Uh - no, I mean-”

Flynn saved her by cutting in with, “I’m glad to see you got the cast off. No complications?”

“One arm went in, one arm came out.” Yuri flexed his bicep, which wasn’t very impressive after three months of atrophy. “It’s all good. Let’s head down to the basement.”

“Are you sure?” Karol asked. “The stairs won’t be too much for you?”

“Nah, I’m fine.” His back was already killing him from coming down from his bedroom, but Alexei was in his office with the door cracked open, and Yuri would be damned if he had his first meeting with friends during his week of captivity within earshot. He motioned for the others to go down first so that he wouldn’t hold them up limping down.

“Sit wherever,” Yuri told Estelle, the only one not familiar with his house. “If you need a washroom, there’s one on this floor through the guest bedroom.”

They spread out on the pair of squishy leather sofas and for a moment, Yuri felt at peace. Hanging out in the basement with his friends again was just like old times, and he could briefly forget about the stress Alexei had him under. Unfortunately, the only thing his friends wanted to talk about was school. Karol chatted about his teachers and what projects they’d been doing in social studies, and Flynn made several strangled noises and shaky hand motions to indicate his own feelings toward school. Rita mentioned a professor who wouldn’t take her seriously because she’d entered university so young, and even Raven’s life stories were about a particularly rowdy class he’d been a supply teacher in a few days earlier. The only person who wasn’t in school was Judith, and Yuri wasn’t even confident about that because Judith was notoriously tight-lipped about her life.

He was grateful, then, when they finally started talking about less stressful subjects, like a haunted castle and a pile of skeletons in the cellar. Yuri filled them in with everything Alexei had told him, and then continued. “I looked in my mom’s journal last night. She had a list of disappearances in the castle, and it lines up. The ten woman are probably the maids, then there are the four people who went missing since the castle became a museum. There’s one more male body, and I think it’s this painter guy my mom mentioned.”

“You said he was the first to disappear?” Rita asked.

“So Mom said. The construction workers were actually the first probably, but it looks like no one ever reported them missing, or else Mom didn’t find out about it.”

Raven scratched the stubble on his chin. “I wonder how this painter fits inta things. Seems weird ta start a reign of murder with a guy visitin’ the house, and then switch ta pickin’ off the ladies workin’ there.”

“How can we find out more about him?” Karol asked. “He died a hundred years ago and I don’t think he’s famous enough to be on Wikipedia.”

Estelle perked up. “There might be something in the castle records. He was commissioned to do a portrait of Nathaniel and Alice, right? If there was an employment contract or anything, there might be a record of it.”

“Good thinking,” Flynn said. “Can you look into that for us?”

“Of course!”

“Oh, and what about Nathaniel’s journal?” Karol looked around the group. “Who has that? Did we ever figure out if Nathaniel had been trying to summon something?”

Estelle answered. “The journal itself is in the possession of the museum now. They plan to display it after the museum opens up again. I asked if I could look through it, but Mr. Dropwart said I’d have to wait and that it wasn’t anything of historical interest anyway. He said it was a lot of ‘magical nonsense’ by the end.”

“I’d like to get a chance to read it,” Flynn said. “It’s too bad you and Rita were interrupted before you could get far, Yuri.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. “Don’t you have enough stuffy old texts to be studying at school?”

Flynn frowned. “Well… I can handle one more.”

“Actually.” Judith twisted to fully face Yuri. “On the subject of Nathaniel’s ideas, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about, Yuri. Raven and I have been thinking about something.”

“Oh, yeah?’ Yuri raised his eyebrows. “Sorry, but to be honest I don’t want to know what Raven’s been thinking about, and you probably shouldn’t bring it up with Karol in the room.”

“Hey!” Raven pouted. “It’s somethin’ serious this time!”

“Alright, shoot.”

“Do you know about poltergeists?” Judith asked.

The question, seemingly out of left field, made Yuri pause before answering. “Noisy ghosts? The kind of haunting that involves a lot of rapping on walls and flying objects. Usually caused by squirrels, the wind, or carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Judith nodded. “Things like, oh, doors randomly slamming, or lighting fixtures dropping without warning.”

Yuri raised his eyebrows. “So… you think that the thing in Zaphias Castle is a poltergeist?”

“Maybe,” Raven said. “But there’s another theory about poltergeists.”

“There’s no consensus on the subject,” Judith explained, “but some parapsychologists believe poltergeist activity is caused not by any sort of spiritual entity, but by a living agent with latent psychokinetic powers. The agent is generally a young person in their teens to early twenties, and is generally in the midst of some kind of major stress or trauma. The theory is that the pressure in the person’s home life causes them to subconsciously lash out with their latent PK abilities.”

By the way the rest of the group was watching him, Yuri got the feeling they had already been told about this theory and were now waiting anxiously to see how he’d react to it. He said, “Ok… so. I see where you’re going with this. You think that agent is me, don’t you?”

Raven put on a sheepish smile. “It’d explain a lot.”

“Think about the rapping on the tape we listened to,” Flynn said. “Right after you said… what you said, in a fit of anger, that’s when the knocking happened. We even said at the time that it sounded like someone pounding on the table.”

“Which would mean,” Rita said with a hint of amusement, “that you dropped the chandelier on Flynn.”

“I didn’t.” As mad as he’d been at Flynn, he had never wanted to hurt him.

“But you may have done so subconsciously,” Judith said. “Your anger at Flynn might have lashed out at him without you deciding to.”

Yuri wanted to argue, but he suddenly remembered a painting falling off the wall last week. He’d been emotional about finding his mom’s journal, hadn’t he? Then suddenly it had not just fallen, but thrown itself several feet from the wall. “So, what, I’m… I’m psychic? You think I can move things with my mind?”

“You did find that secret elevator,” Karol said. “And the secret compartment in the desk.”

“The desk compartment had no way to open it from the outside,” Estelle said. “Conservationists went over it thoroughly. They can’t figure it out, because it feels like the only way to open it - or close it again properly - is to move the latch without touching it, while the compartment is closed.”

Judith asked, “Have you felt anything in the castle, Yuri? Instinctive knowledge, maybe? Feeling emotions left behind?”

Yuri considered the flash of sudden terror he’d felt in the elevator on the first day, which Rita hadn’t shared. He thought about the smell of death coming from that same elevator shaft that Flynn hadn’t noticed. There had been the whisper in his mind to check the mantle, and the ghost girl who’d pointed out the wall. “Uh….” It couldn’t be true. It was ridiculous, and it was silly. He hated that there was so much evidence to back up something that was definitely not true. “How come this has never happened before, then? I’m a little old to suddenly gain magical powers.”

Rita of all people answered, which was the worst because he always relied on her to be a skeptic. “Didn’t Nathaniel’s journal say that he only came fully into his powers after almost getting shot in the war?”

Karol nodded with wide eyes. “And you almost died last December, in the theatre.”

“That’s….” Yuri shook his head. “Are you suggesting the castle isn’t haunted after all? That it’s all just me being moody?”

“No,” Judith said. “I think the castle is haunted, but I think our findings have been muddled by poltergeist activity caused by you.”

“I’m not psychic,” Yuri insisted and hated the doubtful looks everyone gave him. “I’m not!”

Karol spoke up eagerly, “I think it would be really cool to be psychic. You could move things with your mind like a Jedi!”

“Yeah, but I’m not psychic.”

“It’s something to think about,” Judith said diplomatically.

“No way in hell am I even going to think about it. I’m not psychic.” Yuri glared around the room and dared anyone to contradict him.

Flynn stood up. “Yuri, I’d like to get a drink, but can you show me where the glasses are?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” Yuri followed Flynn back upstairs, silently appreciating the way Flynn stopped at the top and patiently waited for him to drag his legs up the stairs. On the main level, Flynn led the way back to the kitchen. Considering how many hours Flynn had spent in this house during their teens, it didn’t surprise Yuri when Flynn kept going, right to the sliding glass door leading to the patio. The wooden patio looked out over the sloping grass yard that eventually merged with the woodland behind the house. Yuri had loved that yard as a kid, and somewhere in those trees were the remains of a fort he and Flynn had built when they were ten.

“I’m sorry for dragging you up the stairs.” Flynn leaned against the wooden railing as he looked back at Yuri. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

“It’s fine. I’m not that helpless.” He joined Flynn at the railing and tried to make it look like he was leaning on it to be casual and not because he needed the help staying upright.

“I know that this psychic suggestion is difficult to believe. I had trouble with it when Raven and Judith first brought it up, too.”

“Talking about me behind my back, are we?”

Flynn flashed guilt. “It was only last weekend. We wanted you to be there too, but, Alexei….”

Yuri scowled. “Yeah. Alexei.”

“But anyway. I know we’ve always been on the same page regarding the supernatural, but after everything that’s happened in the castle, I’m starting believe. Too much has happened that we can’t explain.”

Yuri picked at an old splinter on the railing. “You know… I don’t think I mentioned I saw a ghost the day I found the bodies.”

Flynn breathed in sharply. “You did? Where? Who?”

“That was how I found the elevator. It was like, someone told me to inspect the mantle. Then I went into the stairway and saw her for half a second, pointing to the elevator. I’m still not sure I’m not crazy.”

“I don’t think you are.” Flynn slowly shook his head. “I’ve seen things, too. During the séance, and in the study as well. Remember that day the bell rang to summon me, Judith, and Raven to the study? I bet it was the same spirit who showed you the elevator. The spirits of the people whose bodies were dumped down there wanted that room to be found.”

Yuri tried to laugh this off. “Now you’re sounding like Judy.”

“Well, maybe the world is more complicated than we thought. Don’t laugh - accepting this has been difficult for me.”

“It’s….” But he didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t want to believe in ghosts. He’d stubbornly denied the possibility for ten years and felt stupid admitting he’d been wrong. Still, hearing that Flynn was on the same page made it easier to admit. That was how life had always been, hadn’t it? As long as he was side-by-side with Flynn, he could get through anything. What an idiot he’d been to lock Flynn out these past few months when he could have done with the moral support more than ever.

More than that, what an absolute moron he’d been to reject Flynn’s offer to be his boyfriend - his partner. As he looked at Flynn’s thoughtful expression and the care in his eyes, Yuri knew that if Flynn had just timed his confession for now instead of in the hospital, Yuri would have said yes. He almost wanted to say yes right now, as if he could say it today and then package it up to send backward in time to the moment he should have said it. Life wasn’t like that, though. There were things in life you would only get one chance to say, and just like he couldn’t go back and tell his mom he loved her before going to bed the night she died, he also couldn’t go back and tell Flynn he felt the same way before Flynn accepted the rejection and moved on.

All these thoughts swirled around his head and the dumb, handsome face that had him in turmoil was waiting on a response to the ghost conversation. To avoid continuing to stare into Flynn’s eyes, he sighed and turned to rest both arms on the railing. “I think I believe, too. I don’t want to, but nothing else makes sense. Something in that castle killed my mom, and I don’t think it was a living person.” He frowned and shook his head. “Even ignoring the maids, the construction guys, and the painter, three people besides my mom have gone gone missing in that house in the years since it became a museum - some of them decades ago. It just doesn’t make sense. I think… I think we have to accept that something supernatural is going on there.”

“Right. Ok.” Flynn took a deep breath. “So, what do we do about it? Call in a rabbi?”

Yuri thought back to what Raven had told him their first day at the castle. “I wonder if the best thing to do is just leave it alone. Trying to drive it out might make it mad and even more dangerous.”

“That’s not feasible.” Flynn shook his head. “It’s a museum open to the public. As much as I’d love to close the place and let it rot, the city’s not going to shut it down. There would be public outcry about abandoning our heritage from thousands of residents who have never actually been there.”

“You’re right. Damn, do you think we can get away with burning it down?”

“Yuri! You can’t burn a historic museum!”

“I’m only joking!” Though it had only partially been in jest. “I think we need more information. We don’t know who - or what - is haunting that place, just that it likes to kill people. We should figure out what we’re dealing with before deciding what to do about it.”

“I agree. We need to fins out exactly what happened to the people in the castle.” He frowned and added, “It might be difficult while we can’t get into the castle, but as long as the police have it closed we search library archives, records, anything else like that.”

“I’ll leave that to you. I’m no good at book research.”

“Fine, but I might see if the others want to take on the lion’s share of it. I have enough studying to do for classes. Now, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about, too.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s just… how are you, Yuri?”

“Eh?” Yuri looked away from the trees with confusion. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you say that. I’m serious, though. Are you ok? I’ve been worried about you and hardly heard from you this week.”

Yuri hesitated. There was nothing he hated more than pushing his personal issues onto his friends, but telling Flynn he was fine was a fat lie. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Telling me not to worry isn’t the same as telling me there’s nothing to worry about.”

Damn, Flynn always saw right through him.

“Look, I know that everything going on with your mom is a lot to deal with. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if it was a my dad caught up in this. I know you can work through that on your own. I just want to know… are you isolating yourself because you want to be alone right now, or is this Alexei playing prison warden?”

“…Bit of both.”

“But are you alright? Are you safe? Do you have food? Has he hurt you?”

“I’m fine.” He saw Flynn’s doubtful expression and smiled as reassuringly as he could. It was endearing how earnest Flynn’s desire to help him was. “Things aren’t… great. Honestly, though, I’m just grounded.”

“Ok…. But if you ever need anything, just let me know. You can crash on my couch if he need to escape.”

Yuri laughed as if this was a casual topic. “Sodia would be thrilled.”

Flynn kept up the serious tone. “Sodia would understand. And Yuri, you know… you know this isn’t normal, right? Twenty-one-year-old adults don’t get grounded.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. “Alexei’s the one you need to convince of that. I’m dealing, alright? I promise, if it reaches the point where I need to run, you’ll be the first to know.” He laughed again and added, “And that’s a promise, so don’t believe Alexei if he makes me disappear and then claims I took off.”

Flynn didn’t seem to find that funny. “Just let me know if there’s ever anything I can do.”

“Yeah, alright. We should head back down before the others worry that you were severely dehydrated.”

* * *

Yuri was not psychic. During the past few weeks, his rock-solid stance on ghosts had crumbled to just a tiny pebble of doubt, but accepting the possibility of supernatural entities as a concept was a lot different than accepting he himself had magical powers. He was incapable of meshing his image of himself with the image of a fortune-teller covered in jewellery and shrouds, waving hands over a crystal ball. Part of him said that Judith was a mostly-normal girl who rode a motorcycle and wore blue jeans, and that there was no rule that being psychic meant suddenly looking like a carnival cliche, but he just didn’t like it.

Yuri spent the entire weekend thinking about this. He didn’t have much else to do, because Alexei had his computer and even watching TV all day was out, considering Alexei was home all day on the weekend and also in the living room. That was why, even though he was absolutely not psychic, he found himself lying in bed on Sunday night and trying to knock a book off the shelf with his mind.

It was ridiculous. He felt embarrassed to even be trying. It was stupid of him to even consider that this was a bad book to practice on, because it had been required reading in high school and had sat on his shelf gathering dust ever since he found Sparknotes. It wasn’t going to move, and this whole thing was -

The book tipped to the side and toppled to the carpet.

“Shit!” Yuri scrambled to his knees in a tangle of blankets. He stared at the book with even more trepidation than he’d given it when his teacher first said he had to read the whole thing. It was… a coincidence. Lots of things could look like proof of the supernatural if you gathered up a bunch of coincidences. Gravity had simply overtaken it and dragged it off the shelf.

He let out a heavy breath, his chest full enough with his pounding heart. It was just a coincidence. He left his bed to pick up the book, holding it away from his body like it was radioactive. “Stupid book,” he grumbled. “Fell because of the weight of your bullshit.”

Back in bad, he rolled to his side to face the wall and refused to even try proving he wasn’t psychic. He wasn’t psychic. He was just a normal guy. As he drifted off to sleep, he very nearly believed it.


	10. Story from the Past

Flynn was on his way into his apartment on Sunday night when his phone began vibrating in his back pocket. Having just come back from the drug store, he scrambled to reach the kitchen island to drop the bags off.

“Did you remember the lightbulbs?” Sodia asked from the couch.

Flynn replied while scrambling for his phone. “Yes. They’re in… one of the bags, can’t remember, sorry. Hello?” He smiled apologetically at Sodia when she turned around to see why he’d greeted her.

“Good evening,” said an elderly voice on the phone. “Is this Flynn?”

“Yes. Who is calling, please?”

“This is Mary McIntrye, dear. We met last week? Or… was it the week before?”

“Oh! Yes, hello Mrs. McIntyre, I wasn’t expecting you.” He grabbed the white paper bag with the testosterone he’d picked up from the pharmacy and headed to his room, regretfully leaving Sodia to sort through the rest of his household purchases.

While he walked, Mary continued. “I’m sorry to be calling you on a Sunday night. Do you have time to talk now?”

“Yes, it’s fine, I just got back from the store but I can talk now. Did you remember something you had forgotten?”

“No, I didn’t forget.” She paused to laugh at herself. “I apologize for snapping at you - you won’t believe how many people doubt my memory. Like an iron box, always has been.”

“Uh, I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“No, shush, I’m the one who needs to apologize. I didn’t forget to tell you this - I chose not to. In fact, I lied to you, and I still feel poorly about that.”

“You lied?” Flynn leaned forward and pressed the phone closer to his ear as if that would get him closer to the truth.

“Yes, I did, am I am sorry about that. I felt that I had to, because the girls and I made a promise - over eighty years ago now - to take this secret to the grave. I’m the only one left, and I’ve never told a soul.”

“I understand. I can’t hold it against you if you were caught between keeping a promise and telling a lie. May I ask what prompted you to change your mind?”

Mary sighed heavily. “Maybe you’ll think we were naive, but back then, the idea that the girls were being murdered seemed unthinkable. We thought that Mr. Tattersall took them to his bedroom and then threw them out so he wouldn’t have to look them in the eye the next day. Mrs. Hallewell, though… she knew. I’m sure she did.”

“Wait - Mr. Tattersall? I’m sorry for interrupting, but are you saying you know who was taking the girls?”

“Oh, there’s no way to prove it. I suppose it’s possible it was the butler, or one of the footmen. We all knew it was him, though. We weren’t blind; we saw the way he looked at us like we were disposable. These days, men like him would be called ‘creepy’, I suppose. He gave off ‘bad vibes’ as my great-granddaughter would say.”

Flynn’s expression hardened. “Yes, I know the type.”

“We felt like he was spying on us. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but we all believed he had some way of watching us without being seen.”

“Through a secret room, you mean?”

“No, that makes too much sense. There were evenings when he would retreat to his bedroom and for all the world appear to be asleep, and yet we’d feel like a presence was in our rooms, spying on us.”

“I… don’t follow.”

“When I was seventeen, another girl - Maud - stole a silver spoon from the pantry. The house was in a hubbub searching for it, which I think is the reason she took it. That night, Maud pulled it out of her pillowcase and showed it to Edith and I. We three were the only ones in the room, I’m certain. I was aghast, of course, and warned her to put it back before she got into trouble. She just slipped it back into her pillowcase with a wink. Then the next morning, I was scrubbing the floor in the corridor when I saw Maud being led to our room by the butler. I couldn’t hear exactly what was said, but a few minutes later, he came out with the spoon and Maud was sacked that day. He knew the spoon was in her pillow.”

“It could have been a guess,” Flynn suggested. “It doesn’t seem like a huge leap to search the servant’s belongings for a missing valuable.”

“That’s what I told myself, but it never quite sat right with me that he went directly to her bed to find it. It seems a little too lucky.”

“Even still, you said there was a third person who knew.”

“Edie didn’t squeal on Maud, I’m certain of it. They were friends, and she was quite distraught when Maud left.”

Flynn wasn’t as ready to exonerate Edith, but he didn’t feel like getting into an argument with an elderly lady over whether an old friend was a snitch. “Still… I don’t quite understand what you’re insinuating. Do you believe Mr. Tattersall was listening at keyholes, or lurking in the walls?”

“Not exactly. We believed that he could somehow… step out of his body and walk around, listening invisibly while appearing to be asleep in bed.”

“Uh….”

As if in defense of this absurd statement, Mary said, “I found a book of his open in the library, once. It showed an illustration of a man meditating and a ghostly version of him hovering above it.”

The only reason Flynn didn’t file all of this away as the demented ramblings of a very old woman was that he already knew Nathaniel had been researching astral projection. That seemed ridiculous, but if Yuri had psychokinesis and a ghost was haunting the castle, why couldn’t astral projection be real? Was it really that much crazier? “I understand. So, let’s believe that he was astral projecting to spy on you. Is this what you swore to secrecy?”

“Not exactly. Certainly none of us spoke about out theories of his powers after we left the castle, because none of us liked the idea of spending the rest of our lives in an asylum, but the oath of secrecy was about, well, what we did about him. Mr. Tattersall was leaving his body to spy on us, and also… taking us, for an unknown purpose. I told you that Mrs. Hallewell looked after us, and she did. A few nights after Edie disappeared, she gathered us in her room and explained her plan. The next time Mr. Tattersall went to his room in the evening to lie as if in a trance, we snuck in after him. Mrs. Hallewell showed us how to carve those witches’ marks into the floor in a circle around his bed, hidden beneath the rug. She told us that they would create a barrier that magical beings could not cross.”

Mary hesitated and the next time she spoke, the doubt and guilt was clear in his voice. “I am a Christian woman and I know that witchcraft is a sin, so sometimes I think that Mr. Tattersall’s death was an intervention by god to protect us. All I know is that after we drew those symbols on the floor, he never woke up again. Mrs. Hallewell said that the barrier prevented him from returning to his body. A doctor said he had fallen into a coma without cause or warning, and shortly after, he passed away. Maybe it really was a medical coincidence, but for eighty-five years, I’ve known that I am guilty of murder.”

Flynn didn’t know what to say to that. The gravity of Mary’s statement demanded a response, but he was caught up in the idea that Nathaniel Tattersall had already been in spirit form, then cut off from his body. If the body died when the soul wasn’t in it, what happened to it? Did it die as well, or might it… linger? Mary was still waiting for him to speak, though, so he scrambled to say, “I… understand why you were hesitant to tell me the truth when we first spoke.”

“Mrs. Hallewell told us she would take any and all blame for what we had done. The four of us - the other two girls, Mrs. Hallewell, and me - swore that we would never tell a soul about what we did that night. I held my oath for all these years, not even telling my husband. But then on the news, I saw what you kids found in the castle. All those bodies, left to rot… it’s too horrible. I have to thank you, because for eighty-five years I’ve held this guilt over what we did and if it was the right thing. Now that I know what truly happened to those who disappeared - what he did to Edie - I can rest easily. The others who were involved are dead now, so I’m the only one to be affected by this secret and I don’t feel guilty anymore.”

“Thank you for telling me the truth.”

After Mary hung up, Flynn sat on his bed and stared at the wall for a long minute. Then, he moved to his desk and opened his laptop to type out an email. The rest of Brave Vesperia needed to hear about this.

* * *

Monday came with a blessing for Yuri: Raven showed up at the door to announce that Alexei was busy at work and unable to drive Yuri to physical therapy. Yuri assumed it had to be something to do with the Zaphias Castle case for Alexei to be so unwilling to leave work, to the point of tracking down Raven’s phone number and requesting a favour. In any case, Yuri wouldn’t put too much question into something that worked out for him.

After his appointment, Yuri dragged Raven away from the cute receptionist he’d been trying (and failing) to flirt with. “Thanks for the ride, old man.” Yuri climbed into van.

“No problem! I’m always happy ta have a favour owed me.” He winked and added, “By the way, you ever plan ta get your license?”

Yuri shrugged. “When I have a car to use it with.” He didn’t want to think about how long it would be until he was stable enough to buy his own car.

“I could give ya lessons some time, if ya want. This old baby is past the point of bein’ ruined by a kid learnin’ ta drive on her.” He patted the steering wheel fondly as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“Nah, it’s fine, don’t go out of your way for me.”

Raven rolled his eyes. “How’d I know you’d say that? Anyway, how about we go out of our way for both of us today? We can get lunch. Ya must be bored stuck at home all day.”

Yuri hated that his immediate reaction was to calculate what time Alexei ought to be home, how much wiggle room he was willing to give that estimate, how long lunch would take, and how dire the consequences would be if they timed it wrong and Alexei found out he’d gone out and had fun while he was supposed to be grounded. If Alexei was so busy at work that he he couldn’t make it home this afternoon, though, Yuri suspected he would be home later than average. He probably had time to make a pit-stop, though he wasn’t hungry for lunch.

“Do you mind swinging by His Majesty’s Theatre?”

“Eh? Why d’ya wanna go there?”

“I want to check something out.”

“Damn, I figured you’d never wanna lay eyes on that place again. If you say so, though, sure. It’s not too much out of the way.”

Yuri didn’t say much on the drive there. He didn’t want to talk about his reasoning for going to the theatre, especially because he didn’t have a concrete answer himself. He hadn’t even planned to go until the moment he realized he had time to go somewhere this afternoon. The theatre was both the first place he’d seen a ghost and the place where his alleged psychic powers were triggered. He needed solid answers on what the hell was happening in his life, and he just might find them there.

Raven parked in the lot behind the old building. Yuri said, “Wait here. I’ll only be ten or fifteen minutes,” and climbed out of the van. Dirt-encrusted snowdrifts around the perimeter of the lot leaked miniature lakes among the potholes, forcing Yuri to take a roundabout route to avoid the worst puddles. Now that they were a couple of days in spring, he hoped no more fresh snow would add to the piles. Last time they were here, they used the stage entrance off the parking lot, but this time he went to the row of glass doors off the sidewalk. Posters by the doors advertised the current run of Tale of the Jade Planet: The Musical!

By the time he reached the entrance, Yuri was limping. Physical therapy was great in the long run, but he knew he’d be sore and tired for the rest of the afternoon. He pressed a hand against the stone wall and gave his tired joints and spine a rest before opening the door so that no one inside would see him limping. It turned out that he only had one person to worry about, because there were no shows today so only a single young woman sat behind the ticket window with her attention on her computer. When Yuri got closer, he spotted a game of solitaire reflected in her glasses. This was quickly minimized as soon as she saw him reach the counter.

“Good afternoon. Are you looking for tickets?”

“No, actually. I have a bit of a strange request. I sort of almost died in here last December and I was wondering if I could look around back stage for… closure?”

She stared at him for a moment and then said, “Let me go get the manager.”

The manager was a man named Stephen whom Yuri vaguely recalled communicating with Flynn and Karol over email. They’d organized the permission to do the initial ghost hunt through him, though Yuri had never met him in person. When he met Yuri in the lobby, he looked about what Yuri would expect a man who worked in a theatre would look like: pale, nerdy glasses, and a hum of energy that came from herding actors all day. After greeting Yuri, he shook his hand and tried not to look at the brace around Yuri’s left arm.

Stephen glanced toward the door to the staff offices and fidgeted. “Do you want to see the inspection certificates? I can make more photocopies for you.”

“The… what?”

“The certificate from last year’s safety inspection. Does your lawyer need another copy?”

Yuri blinked. His brain was on ghosts so the sudden conversation about lawyers and inspection paperwork made him take a moment to shift gears. “Lawyer? What?”

Now Stephen looked confused. “You’re just here to look around? For personal closure?”

“Isn’t that what I literally just said?”

Stephen relaxed like a wire had been cut. “Oh, thank god. I thought you were trying to find more evidence to resurrect the lawsuit.”

“I think I’m missing a large chunk of information here.”

Stephen frowned. “You don’t know?”

“Apparently not. What’s there to know?”

“After the accident - and I’m glad to see you on your feet, by the way - your father-”

“Step-father,” Yuri corrected automatically.

“Step-father, sorry, came by with a lawyer threatening a lawsuit over the unsafe catwalk and saying we were liable for your injury. It took a couple of weeks to settle but they backed down after we provided the safety certificate proving the catwalk was up to standards. I assumed you were part of it.”

“Yeah, I was kind of totally immobile and high on morphine for the first week after the accident so just assume I wasn’t meeting with many lawyers.” He wasn’t sure how he felt about Alexei doing this. It felt like a violation, because he was an adult and he didn’t need a guardian to step in and take care of legal work on his behalf. At the same time, a week after the accident, he hadn’t even begun discussing with doctors the reality of needing to move back home and hadn’t spoken to Alexei for months. With Yuri as an independent adult, any payout for the lawsuit would have gone entirely to him, not benefiting Alexei at all. Had Alexei hired a lawyer and gone through this work to get a payout purely to help him? Or was it all just one more manifestation of Alexei treating Yuri like his property?

That was not the question he had come here to answer, so Yuri brushed over it quickly. He had plenty of midnights to spend lying awake mulling over that one. “I honestly had no idea a lawsuit had ever been on the table. I just wanted to look around backstage and I swear I’m not trying to sue you.”

Stephen clapped his hands together. “Right, well, in that case I can show you back. I think we owe that to you - not that we legally owe you anything because the accident was entirely out of our hands.” The second bit had been said in a rush, like a list of horrible side effects at the end of a drug commercial.

Yuri followed Stephen through the double doors into the theatre. They walked down the aisle and up a few steps at the side of the stage to walk to the middle. It was familiar from the night they’d spent here last December, though he couldn’t help looking immediately to the catwalk over the stage. Now, a metal structure spanned the distance. Then his eyes trailed all the way down to a spot on the wooden stage where the old, worn planks were interrupted by a patch of much fresher wooden flooring.

“Did my body crack the stage? I thought it was vice versa.”

“Oh, it was,” Stephen said in a chipper voice before catching himself and glancing guiltily at Yuri. “That is, uh, we had to replace some of the stage because the bloodstains soaked into the wood and wouldn’t come out.”

“Oh. Neat,” Yuri said for want of anything intelligent to say. “Did you fix the outlet problems?”

“Outlet problems?”

“How the cord for the lights slips out of the outlet super easily.”

Stephen frowned at him. “Is that a problem? None of our light techs have ever complained about that.”

“Oh… I must be misremembering.” He wasn’t, he was sure, and if he wasn’t misremembering the struggle to keep the lights on, that had to mean that something had been toying with him that night.

“There have never been any problems with any of our facilities. It really was a freak accident,” Stephen assured him. “Our tech guys used that catwalk every performance for years and never reported any sort of structural worries. It passed all the safety inspections and we even had a guy come out after your dad-”

“Step-father.”

“-Right, sorry, after he threatened the lawsuit. There was no sign of damage on the supports and he said the wooden boards looked like they’d snapped from a sudden force striking them rather than gradual wear.”

Yuri looked up again. “A sudden force?”

“Yes. It was quite odd. He said it looked more like something large and heavy had landed on them and caused them to collapse under the weight. You and your friends didn’t have anything heavier than a camera, though, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“We have heavier stage lights and special effect machines on there all the time with no problem. I can’t imagine what could have caused a force to hit it. But then, maybe he wasn’t a very good inspector.”

“M-hm.” Yuri was busy trying to remember the moments before the fall. His memories were fuzzy, thanks both to the bodily trauma and oxygen deprivation, but he had a faint memory of frantically wishing to get out of there in any way possible. If psychic powers could drop a chandelier on Flynn, why couldn’t they crack some wooden floorboards? These outbursts of psychic energy were supposed to be caused by intense emotional duress, and there wasn’t much more distressing than being strangled.

Because he was strangled. The story about getting choked by a loop of cord when the catwalk collapsed had been a nice lie that let him continue denying the existence of ghosts, but he couldn’t keep clinging to it. It was hard to notice with Stephen standing right next to him, but a hint of malevolence lurked in the shadows in the theatre’s wings. He couldn’t explain how he knew this beyond it just being a feeling the same way Judith pointed out vague ‘feelings’ at hauntings, but it was there. Maybe the reason he was the only person in the theatre’s history to be outright attacked was because it could sense him, too, and didn’t like being spotted.

Having gotten the answer he had dreaded, he thanked Stephen for his time and returned to the van.

When he hopped in, Raven said, “Find what you were looking for?”

“Enough.” He wondered if he should tell Raven and the others about the theatre being definitively haunted. If it had attacked him, there was a chance it could attack someone else. Still, he was the first person to have been attacked in all the decades of it being rumoured to be haunted. The chances of anyone else getting hurt were slim, and telling them it was haunted would mean getting into a conversation about what had happened to him and the confirmation of his psychic abilities. That was something he’d rather keep to himself. He could discuss what to do about the haunted theatre after they’d finished at the castle.

Yuri spent most of the afternoon debating whether he wanted to talk to Flynn or not. This was just as well, because Flynn was busy with class for most of the day, so he wouldn’t have been available to talk until Yuri finally decided he wanted to that evening anyway. Yuri had gotten into the habit of calling his friends rather than texting them while his left arm was unusable, and it didn’t even occur to him that he could type easily now until after the phone was ringing. He stretched out on the living room couch because he didn’t feel up to walking up stairs and waited for Flynn’s response.

After Flynn picked up, Yuri said, “Hey. Do you have a minute?”

“Yes, I can talk. I probably shouldn’t because I have a paper due on Thursday but I could use the break.”

“Good. Just wanted to let you know that I’ve confirmed I’m a Jedi.”

“You’re a…? Oh! You’re certain?”

“About ninety-nine percent.”

Flynn whistled softly. “I think this lends credence to Mary’s story.”

“What?” Yuri was so caught up in his own psychic drama that he momentarily forgot Flynn’s email yesterday outlining what Mary had said about Nathaniel. “Oh, right.”

“If you can confirm that psychic powers exist, her belief that Nathaniel could astral project is likely true, too.”

“Yeah. Hey isn’t there some million dollar reward out there for anyone who can prove psychic powers are real?”

“I think so, but if they are and no one has yet claimed it, I have to assume either the burden of proof is ridiculously high or else everyone decided it wasn’t worth a lifetime of global scrutiny.”

Yuri had a mental image of scientists abducting ET to study him and wondered about the likelihood of someone wanting to dissect his brain. “Huh… yeah, that’s something to think about.”

“Anyway, I was already leaning on believing her, just based on everything else we’ve seen.”

Yuri nodded. “It honestly doesn’t seem that much more unbelievable than what we’ve already witnessed, plus it explains Nathaniel’s mysterious coma death.”

“So, we know now that Nathaniel was abusing his powers to spy on his maids - and I can think of an obvious explanation for why he was doing that,” Flynn’s disgust dripped off every word on that part, “but we don’t know why he then kidnapped and murdered them.”

“Couldn’t it be the same disgusting reason? You said yourself in the email that Mary suspected he was taking them to his bedroom to assault them and then turning them out on the street. It could still be that, only with murdering them in the end.”

“But why have the murders continued?” A clicking in the background suggested Flynn was fiddling with a pen as he tried to think this through. “Nathaniel murdered the maids when he was alive. But, he continued to kill four more people in the fifty years since then as a ghost. A ghost doesn’t have a physical body - I can’t imagine he would be able to get… um….”

Yuri could picture Flynn’s blush and saved him from spelling it out. “I get you. A ghost probably can’t get off. Besides, one of the victims after death was a middle-aged janitor, and there was a teenage boy as well. I mean, he could be bi, but I think this is more a crime of opportunity. He targeted the maids because they were expendable.”

“Lower class young women, often recent immigrants. Maids are meant to be invisible in a great house like that, and would have been invisible in society as well.”

Yuri wrinkled his nose in disgust. “He took them because he figured nobody would look too deeply into their disappearances, and he was right. Once he was a ghost, I think he just took whoever he could. Anyone he caught wandering alone.” Yuri thought about the times he had scoffed at that rule and a hint of a shiver rushed over him. The doctors at the hospital had been right: he was lucky.

“But why?” There was another loud click of the pen and then silence as Flynn concentrated his energies on thinking. “Was he simply a serial killer? Is that why the killings started only after Alice’s death - she kept him in check somehow? Or did he have some higher purpose?”

“Who knows? I don’t especially care to get into this bastard’s screwed up justifications and reasons. He killed my mom, and that’s reason enough to want to kill him. Or, uh, exorcise him, I guess.”

“I understand. I have to admit, I’m curious about his motive, but you’re right. What we know now is already plenty to motivate purging the castle of his presence. I just don’t know how we-”

“Wait.” Yuri heard a car door slam. “Dammit, Alexei’s home. We can figure out what to do about Nat next time the whole group can talk Bye.” He didn’t wait for Flynn to reply before hanging up. In truth, he supposed it wasn’t that big of a deal to be caught talking to Flynn on the phone. As far as he knew, phone calls weren’t banned and Flynn was still an approved friend. It was just a lifetime of hiding anything he did from Alexei in case that was the next thing that set him off that inspired the immediate reaction.

He had just put his phone back in his pocket and turned on the television when Alexei entered the house. Alexei paused in the living room with a manila folder in hand. Yuri could just make out the name ‘Lowell’ written on the tab in Sharpie under Alexei’s thumb. With a throb, he realized it must be case files about his mother.

“How was your therapy session today?”

“Fine.”

“I apologize for being unable to take you today. There were… developments at work that I simply had to attend to.”

Yuri raised an eyebrow and glanced between the folder and Alexei’s face. “Developments about Mom?”

Alexei shifted the folder to ensure nothing stuck out of the edges. “I’m afraid it is all… classified information. And turn that TV off. It’s far too loud.”

Yuri hit the mute button and the chef on the cooking channel went silent. “If it’s so classified, are you really supposed to take those documents home with you?”

“As the chief of police, I can take out any case files I wish. Nor do I need to justify my decision to do so to you.” He said ‘you’ like it was an insult. “I trust Mr. Oltorain was an acceptable chauffeur?”

Yuri almost asked who Alexei was talking about before remembering that Oltorain was still Raven’s legal surname. “Yeah, he was fine.”

“Did you go anywhere else after the appointment?”

Yuri’s heart skipped a beat. Alexei knew. Except, he couldn’t. When he was a teenager, it had sometimes felt like Alexei was omniscient, but he knew that was false. If he covered his tracks well enough, Alexei wouldn’t know where he’d been. Unless Raven had ratted him out…. Yuri mentally kicked himself for even thinking it and wished he could physically kick Alexei for making him doubt his friend to begin with. “No. We went right home.”

“Because, of course, your grounding did not stop just because I was unable to deliver you to the therapist.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t go anywhere.”

“I see. Explain, then, why I called the house this afternoon half an hour after you should have arrived home and received no answer?”

Alarms went off in his head and he knew that his next answer was vital. He had about three seconds to decide if he was going to say the traffic was terrible and delayed them, or if he had heard the phone ringing but been too exhausted to climb downstairs and answer it. Traffic was too dangerous, he decided. Alexei might have looked up traffic congestion after calling to check if that was an explanation. So instead, he tried to casually shrug and say, “Sorry. I heard the phone, but I had just gone upstairs and was too worn out from therapy to go down and pick it up.”

Alexei moved to the home phone sitting on the kitchen counter and hit the button to play the message on the answering machine. His own voice came out, loud and clear: “Yuri, pick up the phone…. If you can’t make it to the home phone, call me back on you cell immediately.”

Yuri’s blood ran cold. He should have gone with traffic.

Alexei fixed him a stern glare. “Explain why you didn’t call me back as I ordered?”

A lie was already gearing up on his lips, but Yuri held it back. At this point, any lie would still be a justification for not calling Alexei back and there was no point digging himself deeper. “Fine. Whatever. Raven and I went to His Majesty’s Theatre after the appointment.”

Alexei cocked an eyebrow. “Why in the world would you return there?”

Yuri shrugged. “Closure or whatever.”

Alexei waited as if Yuri would say anything else, and then nodded. “Thank you for your honestly. It will be only one night you go without dinner rather than three.”

Fury rushed up from Yuri’s chest, but he kept himself from shouting any of the swear words that had sprung to mind. He wouldn’t put it past Alexei to go back to three missed dinners and then some missing lunches as well if he raised any complaint. “Thanks,” he seethed through gritted teeth.


	11. Spilt Blood

The main library at the University of Zaphias was a six storey monolith of brick. It contained thousands of books, newspaper archives going back a century, and at any given time, at least one student having a mid-university-life crisis in one of the study carrels. Flynn had had his turn being that student in the past, but today he met Judith and Estelle in the lobby with something other than the impending dread of law school on his mind.

“Oh, this library is so big,” Estelle gushed immediately after saying hello. “Ours is much smaller. I mean, it makes sense because Ilyccia College doesn’t have nearly as many students as U Zaphias, but it would still be nice to have so many books.”

“Yes, it’s quite thorough.” Flynn tried to share Estelle’s appreciation as he looked over his shoulder at the bookshelves, but he’d spent too many hours having mental breakdowns among these books to feel any fondness. “Local history is on the fifth floor.” They had decided they needed to get to the bottom of exactly what had happened in the house, and to do that, they wanted to know who the dead painter had been. Flynn led them past the main elevators and to the beat-up old doors of the second bay of elevators.

The three of them chatted about their uneventful Tuesday afternoons until the elevator dinged and they were released into a quiet floor packed with books. There were so many bookshelves here that they had been shoved together, and would part upon the touch of a button like the Red Sea. Whenever Flynn had to get a book from a shelf of this style, he couldn’t stop thinking that he was one mis-pushed button away from being an Egyptian in the Red Sea as the shelves crashed back together.

Flynn scanned the shelf labels as they went. He’d checked the catalogue already and knew exactly which book on Zaphias history he wanted. When they reached the correct row, Flynn pressed the button while Estelle exclaimed with excitement at the moving shelves. Flynn waited until the shelves were fully apart and settled for a few seconds before venturing into the aisle, just in case.

“Judith,” Estelle said when Flynn stopped to search a lower shelf, “even if we do piece together the full story… what are we going to do about the ghost in the castle? This isn’t just a ghost that slams doors. Nathaniel is killing people. We have to do something about that.”

“I know. I’ve been thinking about it, too.”

“So do we need to call in a priest?” She glanced at Flynn and quickly added, “Or, a rabbi? Or anyone? How do you get rid of ghosts?”

“Sometimes the easiest way is just to tell them to leave. Speak firmly and clearly, and burning sage while you do it can’t hurt. But, I don’t think that’s going to work on this ghost.”

Flynn ran his finger over faded canvas spines. Not looking up, he said, “Yes, I think he’s a bit too entrenched in the house to leave after a polite request.”

Judith continued, “Sometimes they don’t realize they’re dead, and you need to guide them to that understanding and help them move on.”

“Do you think that could be the case with Nathaniel?” Flynn finally found the book he was looking for and pulled out The Arts in Interwar Zaphias. “He became a ghost in an unusual way, after all. Rather than dying and becoming a ghost, he was already in spirit form before his body died.” He started leaving the aisle, not keen to spend any more time between the potentially-crushing shelves than necessary. On the way out, he continued, “Perhaps he doesn’t realize he’s dead and still wants to get back to his body?”

“Killing people might be part of it!” Estelle said excitedly. “Maybe he’s trying to perform some… some dark ritual with human sacrifice intended to return to his body!”

Judith frowned. “He started killing people before he died, though.”

Estelle deflated as they reached a table beyond the shelves. “Oh… that’s right.”

“He might still be confused about whether he’s dead, though,” Flynn said. “Whatever reason he had for killing those girls while alive, he’s still doing it while dead. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s dead, and that’s why he continues the pattern.”

“Yes, that’s a good theory,” Judith said. “Lastly, it could be that he has unfinished business and won’t allow himself to move on until he completes it.”

“Huh….” Estelle pressed a hand to her cheek in thought. “Judith, do you suppose that when we did the séance, Nathaniel was the ghost we ended up contacting?”

“Yes, I think that’s a good guess, assuming it wasn’t Anya.”

“It wasn’t,” Flynn said, eyes still on the table of contents he was scanning. “Yuri was certain of that, and I trust him to recognize his mother.”

Judith nodded without any argument. “I believe him, too. I think Nathaniel is also the ‘he’ in ‘he’s coming’ that we heard on the recording in the study.”

Flynn did look up this time, if only because he felt stupid for not making that connection earlier. So much had happened that he’d barely thought about that night with the ringing bell. “You’re right. A spirit of one of the victims had probably been trying to summon us to the study in the hope of us finding the hidden room, and Nathaniel drove her off to keep his secret hidden.”

“Yes,” said Estelle with a hint of impatience, “but what I was going to say about the séance, is that when Judith began channelling the spirit, she kept repeating ‘forgive me’ over and over. I wonder if maybe that’s Nathaniel’s unfinished business is receiving penitence for his murders?”

Flynn opened the book to a chapter on the art scene of the 1930s while Judith answered for him.

“Why would he continue to kill people though?”

“Um….” Estelle shrugged half-heartedly. “It was just an idea.”

Judith smiled reassuringly. “It wasn’t a bad one. There are still of pieces of this puzzle we haven’t found yet, and until then, all of our guesses are shaky at best.”

“Here!” Flynn stabbed the page with his finger. He’d spotted the name Howard Dale and zeroed in on a black and white photograph of a man standing before a portrait of a woman in what looked like an art gallery. Small text below the picture said, Painter Howard Dale was one of Zaphias’ most sought-after portrait artists.

Judith and Estelle’s chairs slid toward Flynn and they leaned over his shoulder. “Look, here.” Estelle ran her finger over the page to a paragraph near the bottom.

Howard Dale (1884 - 1919(?)) was active in Zaphias’ art scene during the decade of the 1910s. He rejected the avant-garde style of his contemporaries and instead advanced the tradition of figurative painting. Engaging with many genres from portraiture to landscape and still life, he attracted a wide audience to his colourful works. His painting Woman in Blue (1917), depicting a lady in Central Park with Zaphias’ distinctive Sword Stair tower in the background, is iconic of the era. Dale’s last produced work, Girl with a Dog, was shown in the Art Gallery of Ilyccia in early 1919. Despite having a long list of commissioned portraits to work on, Dale disappeared from the scene later that year. He was last seen on April 23rd of 1919. Despite fanciful theories about foul play from jealous rivals, it is most wildly believed that he became overcome with the pressure of his work and fled into anonymity.

Estelle was the first to finish reading, and waited patiently for Flynn and then Judith to look up. She said, “But we know he didn’t vanish on purpose. How awful that people brushed his disappearance off as him running away.”

“Yuri’s mom found out that he’d been commissioned to paint a portrait of Nathaniel and Alice,” Flynn said. “So far that’s the only connection.” He’d been hoping to find something about the painter also being involved in esotericism to explain how he might have gotten mixed up with whatever Nathaniel was doing.

“I don’t understand,” Judith said. “Besides the construction workers who built the secret room and were killed to keep the secret, Dale was the first person killed. He killed Dale even before any maids went missing. Why would he start by killing a man who was known to have been visiting his house?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Flynn said. “Nathaniel targeted the maids because they were invisible and easy to make disappear. A painter with a following and ties to the art world doesn’t go unnoticed.”

“Oh, April 23rd!” Estelle blurted. “I should have noticed right away - that’s the same day Alice Tattersall died.”

“The exact same day?” Judith asked.

Estelle nodded once, firmly. “I’m sure of it. She tripped and fell down the stairs in the great hall in the evening of April 23rd, 1919.”

“This isn’t a coincidence,” Flynn said, slowly shaking his head. “Dale went to Zaphias Castle, probably either to start the painting or discuss details before starting, and later that night, he was killed and Alice died.”

“We assume he was killed that night,” Judith reminded him. “He might have been kept alive for a few more days… although you’re right, he probably was killed right away. And it’s also only an assumption that Alice’s death was an accident.”

“You think Nathaniel killed her, too?” Estelle frowned. “That can’t be, though. The police investigated and confirmed that he didn’t get home until over an hour after she died.”

“Is it possible Dale killed her?” Flynn tapped his fingers on the desk to stir thoughts around. “So then Nathaniel comes home an hour later, finds his wife dead, and kills Dale in a fury of revenge. It would explain why Dale doesn’t fit the profile of the other deaths.”

“That could be,” Judith said. She looked down at the weedy man in the photograph. “He doesn’t strike me as the murdering type, but you never know with people.”

“We need to find out what happened the night of April 23rd,” Estelle said. “Do you have any ideas?”

Judith hesitated before confessing her idea, “I’ve been thinking of doing another séance.”

Flynn raised his eyebrows. “The last one didn’t work out that well. If we try again, it’s likely to just get hijacked by Nathaniel again.”

“I thought about that, and that’s why I didn’t suggest trying again right away. But, we have an additional advantage now: Yuri. I wasn’t strong enough to reach out to Anya by myself, but maybe with his help, the two of us together can reach Alice and get an answer about how she died. Flynn, do you think Yuri will go for it?”

Flynn had always prided himself on being able to predict Yuri’s reactions, but now he was uncertain. Yuri had been through a lot lately, and he’d been so isolated for so much of it. Flynn hated to admit that he didn’t know exactly how Yuri felt about being psychic. The distance hurt so much more because of how close they used to have been. It wasn’t just the events at the castle that made Yuri harder to read, Flynn knew. The divide between them had all started when he’d opened his stupid mouth and tried to change the nature of their friendship, and now he didn’t know if things could ever go back to the way they used to be. He dreaded to think that any time he said something kind to Yuri, it would make him uncomfortable with uncertainty over whether it had been prompted by romantic feelings. Flynn wished he could just flick off the switch in his heart that made it thump a little faster when Yuri brushed against his shoulder, but he couldn’t logic his way out of being in love with Yuri and as long as he had these feelings, his friendship with Yuri could never be the way it used to be.

Flynn sighed and shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him yourself. I want to say he’ll be willing if it really is necessary, but I’m not sure.”

“At least you don’t think he’ll be furious with me for even asking. Are we ready to go?”

The others nodded and left the table. On their way back to the elevator, Flynn dropped the book off on a cart to be re-shelved and Estelle took a last moment to gush over the library’s moving shelves.

“This library really is so nice,” she said.

Flynn glanced at a mysterious stain on the hard and scuffed puce carpet. “I guess.”

“I wish I’d gone to U Zaphias,” Estelle said dreamily with her eyes on the books. “Your library is so much bigger.”

“Why didn’t you?” Judith asked. “I find it hard to believe you couldn’t get accepted.”

Estelle’s smile dropped. “Well… my parents refused. I think it worked out ok, though. Ilyccia College is closer to the Castle, which is why I got the job there, and that’s why I met you guys. This month has been kind of scary, but I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you all.”

“I’m glad something good came of this month, at least.” His bruises from the fallen chandelier had cleared up, but he remembered the pain.

“So… after we find out what happened to Alice, and get Nathaniel to stop hurting people, what will you do next?”

“Move on to the next case, I suppose,” Judith said. “We already have a few potential cases lined up, after we got that bit of publicity when Yuri found the bodies.”

“Oh….” Estelle seemed downcast as the stepped into the elevator.

“You seem disappointed,” Flynn said.

“N-no! It’s just, well, I think I’ll miss running around the castle after hours. It’s been scary, but so exciting as well.”

Flynn and Judith exchanged glances and Judith was the one to reply. “You could always join us on the next case.”

Estelle perked up. “I could? Really?”

“If that’s what you want,” Flynn said. “It’s a lot of hours of work for no pay and you may find it difficult to balance university, your job at the castle, and working with Brave Vesperia.”

“Oh, um… that’s true. It has been busy this month and here I can just stay at work to meet you guys rather than going somewhere else….”

“It’s up to you,” Judith said. “I’m sure the others would be happy to have you if you wanted to become a ghost hunter.”

Estelle was still thinking it over when they reached the ground floor. Flynn didn’t expect her to answer right away, because even he frequently struggled with balancing the hobby with his schoolwork and he didn’t have a part-time job on top of that. Next year, when he would hopefully be living in Aspio, he worried if he’d be able to remain a member of Brave Vesperia at all and if maybe he’d have to only join the cases in the summer or winter break.

“I’ll… think about,” Estelle said, and they left the library.

* * *

Yuri was in his bedroom on a Wednesday evening when Alexei opened the door. He sat up in bed, startled, but didn’t bother complaining that someday Alexei should learn to knock. To his even greater surprise, Alexei wasn’t alone.

“Your friend is here to see you.” Alexei’s flat tone conveyed how annoyed he was at this.

Behind him, Judith smiled and waved.

“Judy? What are you doing here?”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. I wanted a to catch up.”

Alexei stepped away, but didn’t leave before adding, “Keep the door open.”

Judith and Yuri both watched him go, and then shared an amused look as soon as his footsteps retreated downstairs. “Ohhh, good thing the door is open,” Judith said as she sat on the edge of Yuri’s bed. “The the threat of Alexei coming up and seeing us is the only thing keeping me from ripping your clothes off at this minute.”

“That’s fair. Seeing Alexei is a mood-killer in a lot of ways.”

Judith giggled and pulled her legs up. “I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this. I figured Alexei was less likely to decline a visit if I just showed up unannounced.”

“It seems to have worked. Is there something you wanted to talk about?”

“Well… have you had a chance to think about what we discussed last Thursday?”

Yuri sighed and leaned back. “About me being psychic? Yeah. It, uh, seems like you were right about that. Damn, I guess I owe you an apology for all the years I thought you were delusional.”

Judith shrugged. “It’s ok. Lots of people don’t believe.”

“And you know the stupidest thing? One of the reasons I thought you were delusional is that sometimes you’d say things like, ‘I can sense fear in this, something horrible happened here,’ things like that, and I felt those things, too. I figured it was just basic human intuition!” Yuri punched his palm. “I feel like an idiot.”

“You think you’ve always been psychic, then? Not only since the accident?”

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about in the past couple of days. I remember being… three, maybe four years old, and being convinced I’d seen a ghost in the stairwell of our apartment building. When I got older, I figured I’d just seen someone’s shadow from the floor above, and thought it was a ghost because of my mom’s enthusiasm for all things supernatural. Now I’m thinking, maybe that really was a ghost.”

“Could be.”

“Did you have a near-death experience?” Yuri asked. “You’ve never mentioned.”

“No. Many people in my family have been psychic, going back several generations. It’s different for everyone. I don’t have psychokinesis, for example, so already our experiences aren’t the same.”

“Yeah, makes sense.”

“But what I hope is that you share my ability to contact spirits. Do you think you’d have any ability as a medium?”

Yuri thought about the scent of death he’d smelled in the elevator shaft that Flynn hadn’t noticed and the whispered urge to investigate the mantle. “I might. Why?”

“I’d like to do another séance, and I was hoping you could help me with it.”

Yuri folded his arms. “You want to contact my mom again?”

“No.” Judith shook her head firmly. “I want to contact Alice. Did you get the email Flynn sent out with the information we learned at the library yesterday?”

“Yeah. Alice died the same night the painter disappeared. Sketchy.”

“Exactly. I want to find out what happened that night, and I think asking her is our best bet. All I want from you is to participate in the séance. I think your presence could boost the power and help us make contact.”

“Last time the séance got hijacked, probably by Nathaniel. How do we know that won’t happen this time?”

“We don’t. But I want to try anyway.”

Yuri wanted to agree, but he had to think about Flynn. He didn’t doubt that Alexei would make good on his threat to ruin Flynn’s admission chances to his dream school, so Yuri was hesitant to risk going to the castle again. “Are you sure you can’t do it without me?”

“Last time, when Nathaniel crashed the séance and began wreaking havoc, he disappeared after you burst through the door. I think you were subconsciously using your powers again to scare him off. I’m worried he might try to show up again, and I would feel much safer with you around.”

That settled things, then. Flynn’s future might be in danger if Yuri went, but all his friend’s physical well-beings could be in danger if he didn’t. Plus… well, he had to admit that he wanted an excuse to return to the castle. He still didn’t know what exactly had happened to his mother and he wasn’t ready to stop trying to get to he bottom of whatever cruelty Nathaniel had been up to. “Alright. I’m on board.” He leaned around Judith to check the hallway beyond his door and listened closely for the sound of Alexei downstairs. In a lower voice, he said, “We’ll have to do it late at night, and I’m going to have to sneak out. When do you want to do it? Friday night?”

She nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Pick you up at midnight?”

“That should be ok. Tell Raven to pick me up at the end of the street.”

* * *

It was Friday night. Yuri sat on the edge of his bed, absently fiddling with the brace on his elbow as he considered possible variables. He couldn’t risk Alexei knowing he’d snuck out, so he ran through everything that had previously tipped Alexei off.

First, he’d tried to pretend he was going to Karol’s uncle’s place, and Alexei called his bluff. That problem was fixed by simply not letting Alexei know he was going anywhere at all. The only reason he’d gotten caught the night he snuck out was because he’d found the bodies and they’d had no choice but to call the cops. If he got out of the house tonight without alerting Alexei, managed to not stumble across a serial killer’s dumping ground, and got in again without waking Alexei up, there was no reason for Alexei to know he was gone.

Yuri arranged the blankets and pillows of his bed into a rough body shape. It wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, but in case Alexei poked his head in on a midnight bathroom run, it would hopefully pacify him in the dark. Yuri pondered the window and considered climbing down for just one more layer of stealth, but he didn’t trust his annoyingly still-healing body to hold his weight.

Yuri pushed the door open and listened until he heard a snore from the master bedroom. Then he listened for a few more to make sure they were in a deep sleep rhythm, and crept out. Making his way downstairs felt like navigating a minefield of potential creaks. At one point, his legs threatened to give out, forcing him to clutch the banister. It creaked and he froze, heart hammering, until he heard another snore.

Yuri didn’t let his guard down until he had cautiously closed the front door and begun walking down the street. The calendar had officially passed into spring now, further improving his mood with a cool breeze that didn’t sting. Raven’s van sat around the corner at the end of his street.

As soon as he approached, the side door slid open and Karol grinned at him. “You made it!”

“Yeah, I had to wriggle through a sewage pipe to get here.” He clambered in and slammed the door. “Alright, Raven, let’s blow this joint.”

On the drive over, Judith summarized their plan for the night. They would conduct the séance in Alice’s bedroom, and use one of her many personal possessions to further establish contact. They weren’t, technically speaking, supposed to touch anything, but Estelle knew exactly what items in the museum had been Alice’s and also where the security cameras were. Though the prospect of breaking the rules and touching an antique worried Estelle, she’d decided it was worth it in the pursuit of making the building safer for everyone.

Raven parked right in front of the building and Estelle used her key to let them in. “Remember,” she said as they filed into the entry hall, “we’re no longer supposed to go past the ropes. Only touch things if you really need to. The castle only re-opened a couple of days ago after the police investigation and we have to be grateful we’re even allowed back here.”

“The police didn’t find anything helpful, did they?” Rita looked from Estelle, who shrugged, to Yuri.

“I dunno,” Yuri said. “Alexei’s been pretty busy at the station so I figure they found something, but he hasn’t told me anything.”

Estelle led the way up the main staircase. The stairs in the study would have been a slight shortcut, but without talking about it, no one wanted to go past the hidden elevator leading to the room full of skeletons. Alice Tattersall’s room was at the end of the hallway. They passed the door to the master bedroom and entered the lady’s suite right at the end of the house. The tower at the corner of the building gave the blue-walled room a circular sitting area projected off the side of the rectangular sleeping area. The bed, with it’s floral-print duvet and headboard painted blue to match the walls, sat against the wall nearest the door. The wall to the left of the entrance was taken up by a marble fireplace below a mirror that made Yuri nervous. If this one broke, too, he couldn’t see a way out of getting blamed for it and having to pay for it.

“This was Alice’s bedroom,” Estelle said softly as they looked around. “It’s connected to Nathaniel’s master bedroom by a short hallway with a communal sitting area. His closet with the hidden staircase to the library is between his and Alice’s room.”

“So, did Alice know something about him?” Rita’s arms were crossed and her face was dismissive. “If he was her husband, but she had a whole separate bedroom.”

“Oh, um, no, actually. That’s just how aristocrats did things back then. Husbands and wives slept in different rooms.”

To Judith, Yuri mumbled, “That’s why peasants had so many more kids.”

She just shushed him instead of replying.

Estelle moved past the group toward the velvet rope that kept them away from the fireplace, writing desk, and sitting area. “We can’t sit in that area because it’s off limits, but would it be ok to sit on the floor, Judith?”

“Yes, there’s no problem about that. As long as we sit in a circle it doesn’t matter if we’re high or low. Dim the lights, Estelle, after I set up the candles.”

Yuri had seen Judith prepare for a séance before and it didn’t seem like she was doing anything differently today, despite how important it was. They sat in a ring on the cool wooden floor with nine candlesticks arranged in a circle in the middle. Yuri sat opposite Judith, with Rita’s freezing and bony fingers in his left hand and Flynn’s strong hand clasping his right.

Estelle was the last to join the circle. She looked to a small security camera placed in the corner of the room, hesitated, and then snatched a fountain pen off the desk. She turned off the room’s lights so that only the circle of candles remained. “This pen was Alice’s,” she said as she took her place between Flynn and Judith and set it in the middle. “Probably the jewellery she wore regularly would be better, but… the camera doesn’t catch the desk.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Judith said. “We’re already in her room, which is a strong connector to begin with.” She gripped Estelle and Raven’s hands and looked around the circle. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. The last time we did a séance here, things got a bit… hairy. If anyone doesn’t want to participate, now is your last chance to go wait in the van. Once we start, it would be even more dangerous to break the circle by leaving.”

Orange candlelight shone on Rita’s pallid expression and he tightened her grip on Yuri’s hand, but she didn’t say anything.

“How are we gonna make sure it’s really Alice?” Raven asked. “Last time, the ghost talkin’ ta us lied.”

“We could try asking her things only she would know,” Estelle suggested. “I know a lot about her.”

“But the person who might be impersonating her is her husband,” Rita pointed out. “I’m sure he knows more about her than you do.”

“Oh… I suppose you’re right.”

At Estelle’s crestfallen expression, Rita stammered, “I mean - it was a good idea! Just… not in this case, y’know?”

“I think we’re going to have to take her word on it,” Judith said. “Are we ready to begin?”

The group chorused their assent and Rita tightened her grip on Yuri’s hand.

Judith let out a deep breath and spoke gently but firmly. “We call upon the spirit of Alice Tattersall. Alice, please answer us.”

Yuri glanced around the room, though there wasn’t much to see beyond their circle of candlelight.

Judith closed her eyes and let her face go blank as she sought spiritual openness. “Alice, hear us. If you’re present, make yourself known.”

Yuri shivered from a chill in the air. He wanted to ask if he was the only one who felt like the room was getting colder, but Judith didn’t like it when people spoke up during a séance.

“Nathaniel is not here,” Judith said firmly. “We simply want to talk to you. If you can hear us, knock once.”

Yuri listened so intently even his heart waited to beat again. The following sharp rap on a window felt like it had hit his chest from the anticipation and Karol drew in a sharp breath.

“Thank you,” Judith said with a smile. “Are you Alice Tattersall? Knock once for yes and twice for no.”

Another single knock came. This time, the sound filled Yuri with a sudden, inexplicable grief that flowed down his chest like a hot liquid. The sudden sadness took him so off guard that he started to pull his right hand away to clutch his face. Flynn gripped it tight and quickly gave him a confused, concerned glance. Yuri breathed harder to compensate for the tightness in his chest and responded with quick, dismissive head shake. It took a moment to realize that this wasn’t his grief at all, but an overpowering aura of it that he felt without understanding how. Across the circle, he met Judith’s eyes and found understanding there. At least it wasn’t just him.

“Alice,” Judith said, “we have called you in an attempt to learn. We want to know what happened the night you died.”

All nine candles flicked simultaneously, eliciting a whispered, “Whoa!” from Karol.

The grief that had been clinging to Yuri like a cold blanket turned hot and his chest throbbed uncomfortably.

“Anger,” Judith whispered with her eyes closed. “And… betrayal.”

Yuri realized it was anger he felt, just hard to recognize when he wasn’t personally angry at anything.

A sudden click startled all of them and a flash of movement behind Judith put Yuri on alert. Something glinted now - a porcelain vase in the hallway. The movement had been the bedroom door sliding open on its own accord. Yuri gasped as fear rushed over him, drowning him in its suddenness. The candles flickered again and this time only eight of them returned to force. Alice’s fear compounded Yuri’s own nerves, until he had trouble telling where his ended and hers began.

“You’re not welcome here,” Judith said firmly. “Leave now.”

Something heavy pounded on the wall three times, making the aged wooden floors rumble in agreement. Estelle winced and a then a gust of cold wind came in from the open door, extinguishing two more of the candles.

“We are speaking with Alice,” Judith said. “I demand that you leave us be.” Her confident eyes glanced around the group and she said more urgently, “Don’t break the circle. We’ve gathered a large amount of energy to contact Alice, and if we release it, he could use it against us.”

Another deafening crash thudded against the wall, followed by another one farther from the door. They continued onward, circling the room and making Yuri’s head spin as he tried to follow the spirit’s location.

“We might need ta push on and try ta ignore him,” Raven said. “I don’t think he’s gonna stop this little temper tantrum and this might be our only shot with Alice.”

Judith nodded and then spoke louder to be heard over the banging. “Alice! If you’re still here, listen! Please talk to us!”

The anger in the room grew stronger and Yuri wondered if it was Alice’s or Nathaniel’s. The continuing ring of thuds sure seemed like anger, but Yuri couldn’t sense Alice’s fear any longer. Had she left the room entirely, or was she so focused on anger that was all she gave off?

“Answer us, Alice,” Judith called. “We just want to know what happened the night you died. Was your fall down the stairs accidental?”

Yuri didn’t know how they were going to hear any knocks from her amid the persistent banging, but Alice seemed to have realized this because she chose a different way to communicate: two more candles blipped out.

“Two candles,” Flynn said. “Akin to two knocks, I suppose.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Estelle whispered.

Yuri didn’t know if she was fearful or thrilled at the discovery because with only four candles left, the light was too dim to see her as more than dim shadows.

“Did the painter, Howard Dale, kill you?” Judith asked.

The sixth and seventh candles flicked off with such speed that the certainty of her answer was in no doubt. Yuri looked to Flynn, who was equally stumped. Dale killing Alice and then Nathaniel killing him in revenge had been their best guess. Judith also seemed unsure of where to go next. She went with, “Were you killed by someone you knew?”

The banging in the room was constant. Yuri felt like he was trying to concentrate in a construction zone and shivered from the chill. Still, the single candle going dark was an obvious answer. The only candle remaining now was the one directly in front of Judith. It cast long shadows up the sharp features of her face. She looked around the group, saw that no one had any better suggestions, and asked the question they had dismissed due to the police investigation. “Relight the single candle for no. Were you killed by your husband?”

Complete darkness plunged around them. So much rage filled the room that Yuri struggled to believe he and Judith were the only ones who felt it. It flooded the room as the banging continued, until the loudest thud of all came from the wall directly behind Yuri. Nothing followed. The ensuing silence was almost worse than the noise. Yuri smelled the last dregs of smoke and heard Rita breathing heavily beside him, but saw nothing in the sudden darkness.

He felt the movement more than saw it. Just outside their ring of clasped hands, hidden by the depths of shadow, someone moved. The sudden creak of a floorboard filled the silent room and Karol smothered a gasp as he scooted forward, away from its source. Another creak nearer to Rita suggested footsteps making their way around the circle.

“Alice?” Judith asked. “If you’re still here, make yourself known.”

The only sound in the room was another footstep. Yuri shuddered as it neared him and Flynn rubbed the back of his hand with his thumb.

“You are not welcome here.” It was certainly a trick of the darkness, but it seemed like Judith’s voice came from much farther away, as if the circle had stretched and expanded and Yuri was far away from the comfort of his friends.

The back of Yuri’s neck tickled and he shrugged a shoulder to rub the hair away. The tickle came again and a bolt of discomfort told him it was fingers brushing through his hair. A sudden memory of a cord biting into his throat overtook him and he gripped Flynn and Rita’s hands as tightly as he could to fight the urge to jump up and tackle what he knew would be an intangible presence.

And then another memory overtook him, this one so vivid that he almost saw it play out before his eyes on a screen of shadow. He saw the back door of the castle opening before him as he crept inside, and then the bookcase opening as he slipped into the hidden passage. This was not Yuri’s memory.

In his mind, he saw himself climb the steep stairs and emerge in a wardrobe filled with dark suits and collared shirts. Yuri wanted to shake the memories out of his head but he was frozen in place, watching himself walk down the second floor hallway. Thoughts flowed through his head:

I’m going to surprise her. She’ll be delighted that I’m home early. I can’t wait to see her face.

He made it to the round room. Yuri pushed the door open, knowing his beloved wife liked to sit and read in the ornate room. He opened his mouth to start a greeting, but Alice was not alone.

Alice sat on a lounge chair, her mousy brown hair tumbling over shoulders covered in lilac silk. A man stood over her, caressing the side of her face. In one moment, every inch of fury that a human was capable of feeling coalesced within Yuri’s heart. Cheating whore. The other man straightened and turned, his mouth open in an ‘O’ of surprise and fear. The fear was because of the pistol in Yuri’s hand, which he barely remembered pulling from his vest.

“Nathaniel, wait-” Alice rose to her feet.

He didn’t wait. His finger twitched without conscious thought and Alice’s scream was drowned out by the bang. The man - the scoundrel \- dropped to the floor with red blossoming across his white shirt.

“How could you?” The words left Yuri’s mouth, but it wasn’t Yuri’s voice saying them. It wasn’t even Yuri’s face in the mirror over the mantel, which he glanced at briefly on his furious stride toward her.

“No!” Alice screamed, holding her arms up. “He was the painter!”

That detail didn’t matter. So he was a painter? He could have been the milkman. Alice screamed again and pushed past him as soon as he got close. He tried to grab her, snatching only a ribbon off her dress. She dashed out the door and he followed, careening around the corner and toward the great staircase.

As she ran, Alice babbled words he couldn’t understand through his haze of rage. She had betrayed him. Adulteress, whore, played him like a fool, laughing behind his back as she spread her legs for other men. But he was stronger than her, and faster, so he caught up with her at the top of the stairs. He reached her and she turned, horror and desperation on her face.

“We were only discussing the portrait!”

He shoved. Panic took over Alice’s face and she screamed as she toppled backward. Yuri stood motionless on the top step, watching her neck twist when it landed halfway down, and listening to her bones crack as she tumbled to the floor of the great hall. At the base of the stairs, her body lay in a twisted heap.

Then, and only then, could her words sink in. Discussing… the portrait? He had to push through the business thoughts that had consumed him while he was away to vaguely remember his dear wife saying something about commissioning a painter to create a portrait of them. Had the man lying dead on the floor of the round room been caressing her neck, or asking her to tilt her head back to change the lighting?

Footsteps interrupted those thoughts. He looked down at the stern, lined face of his butler, Edwards. Edwards looked down at the body of Alice, her neck bent at such an uncanny angle, and then back up the stairs at his master.

“She fell,” Yuri - Nathaniel - said. “There is also a body in the round room. Dispose of it. He was never here. I was never here. I have not arrived home yet. Nobody in the house heard a gunshot.”

Edwards took this in slowly, and then nodded once. “Understood, sir.”

It was a misunderstanding. It wasn’t his fault. He’d made a simple mistake. Alice was dead but it was partially her fault for not considering what that scene would have looked like. It was an accident. It was an accident. It was an accident.

A flash of light jolted Yuri out of the memory. He sucked in air and blinked against the bright overhead light. Rita and Flynn still held his hands, watching him nervously, while the others sat across from him. Judith stood by the door, her hand on the light switch.

“Uh… hey,” Yuri said. “What happened?”

“That’s what I was gonna ask you.” Rita pulled her hand away. “What was an accident?”

“Huh?”

Flynn said, “You went stiff as a board, wouldn’t respond to anything we said even after Nathaniel left, and suddenly started muttering ‘it was an accident’ over and over again. Are you alright?”

“Fine.” Yuri rubbed his temple. “Think I figured out what Nathaniel’s issue is, though.”


	12. Records

They left the castle after Yuri told them about the vision. It had been Nathaniel’s memory, Judith explained. Many ghosts were unable to speak in a way that the living could hear, and projecting their memories directly into the mind of a medium was easier than picking through a story via yes and no questions. From the memory, they at last understood what had happened.

“I can’t believe he killed his wife,” Karol muttered as they climbed into the van.

“I can,” Rita said briskly. “You see it all the time with murders. If someone dies, the first suspect is always the spouse.”

“I just can’t believe it was murder at all,” Estelle said. “I’ve been telling people on tours that she accidentally fell down the stairs. That’s what everyone has believed for a hundred years.”

“And then he got his butler to cover it up.” Raven scowled as they pulled away from the castle. “Probably threatened all the staff to deny they heard a gunshot when the police came calling. Most of them probably legitimately didn’t know he’d been home, o’ course. Got home early, snuck in through the back ta surprise his wife.”

“Poor Mr. Dale,” Estelle said. “He just wanted to paint a portrait.”

Rita, arms crossed, said, “Nathaniel sounds like a real idiot. He just forgot that they’d commissioned a painter? What a moron.”

“And he was already carrying a gun,” Yuri pointed out. “He didn’t have to pick it up from someone. He had it on him. I think that says a lot about what kind of guy he was.”

“Considering that last time he kept saying ‘forgive me’,” Judith said, “I think we can safely say that he seeks penitence for killing Alice.”

“And she doesn’t seem keen on giving it,” Yuri said.

“Why doesn’t he just talk to her?” Estelle asked. “They’re both ghosts and they were in the same room.”

Karol jumped in with an explanation. “They’re both ghosts, but they aren’t exactly on the same field. They were both only able to really communicate with us via banging on things or messing with the lights. They couldn’t speak plainly to each other.”

“Alice especially,” Judith said. “She was very weak. She isn’t usually active in the house; her soul is at rest. I feel bad for dragging her out to talk to us.”

“I heard her fall down the stairs,” Estelle said. “That seems active to me.”

“What you heard was an imprint.” Karol had shaken off the fear from the castle in order to expound his knowledge of the supernatural. “Ghosts are generally divided into two types: imprints and spectres. Spectres are intelligent, and can react to people talking to them, make decisions, and can try to communicate. An imprint is more like… an echo. They’re memories of a person, generally stuck in some sort of loop. They don’t have minds and won’t react to you trying to talk to them. It sounds like an imprint of Alice sometimes loops through her death in the castle, but her actual sentient spirit is generally at rest.”

“That’s why it was very helpful having you around, Yuri,” Judith said. “She was very difficult to contact. Thank you, and I’m sorry you got hit with the memories.”

Yuri shrugged. “It’s fine.” It had disturbed him more than he was willing to admit to witness the murder from the perspective of the killer. Yuri saw Flynn’s face in the rear-view mirror and suspected that Flynn knew how much it had bothered him. Yuri had a moment of sympathy of Judith, who had on previous occasions said she’d experienced the memories of the person who had been murdered. He hadn’t taken her seriously at the time. Now he wondered how she had dealt with being psychic for so many years, because so far he wasn’t a huge fan.

It was approaching two in the morning when Raven stopped the van at the end of Yuri’s street. “Thanks for the ride,” Yuri said as he hopped out. Despite being a block away from his house, he closed the door as gently as he could. Raven waved goodbye, and then Yuri started the walk through his dark suburb.

The chilly air was a relief because it helped him think. Nathaniel had killed a lot of people and Yuri still didn’t know why. He also didn’t know why Nathaniel had built that secret chamber in the first place, because it seemed excessive to build a whole underground room to hide bodies. They had learned a lot about Nathaniel, but still weren’t any closer to getting rid of him and ensuring no one else ended up a skeleton in that hidden room.

At his house, Yuri turned the front door knob as slowly as he could. The door opened with only the faintest of clicks and Yuri slipped in with a feeling of satisfaction.

This was immediately undone when he was confronted by the sight of Alexei reading a book on the couch in the living room. The small glow from a single lamp illuminated his impassive face as he looked up at Yuri. “Welcome home.”

Yuri ignored the sudden instinct to run upstairs and slam his bedroom door shut like a deer escaping a predator. He gazed levelly back at Alexei and replied, “Evening.”

Alexei closed his book and set it on the end table. “Your persistent attempts to sneak around are insulting to my intelligence.”

“At least they’re accomplishing something, then.”

Alexei’s brows lowered in the slightest indication of anger. He strode across the room and Yuri forced himself not to take a step backward. He was barely an inch shorter than Alexei now, but it still felt like Alexei could loom over him like he’d done when Yuri was thirteen. Yuri stared stubbornly back at him, daring him to say anything.

This time Alexei didn’t speak, but slapped him across the face. Yuri was too surprised to react right away, which was for the best because it saved him from his kneejerk reaction of punching back. Taking five seconds to process what had happened was enough time to realize that fighting back could only make the situation worse.

While Yuri’s cheek still burned, Alexei said, “You’re so determined to make yourself the victim, aren’t you? All I have ever done is take on guardianship for a child I didn’t ask for, and done everything I could to ensure you grew up successful. But instead of being grateful, you whine and complain and seem to go out of your way to ruin your own life. Are you doing it purely to spite me?”

“I’m capable of ruining my life for my own benefit, thanks very much. Not everything is about you.” Yuri would have sneered if the side of his face didn’t ache so much.

“You are determined to cast me as the villain, I see. Well, so be it. If I need to be the villain to whip your sorry life into shape, I will. You’ll thank me when you’re older, but for now, you will have to face the consequences of your actions.”

Yuri rubbed the dwindling ache in his cheek. “Thought I already had.”

“No. We already spoke about what the consequences would be if you returned to Zaphias Castle. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be calling my acquaintance in the admissions department of Aspio University to recommend against admitting Flynn Scifo.”

“Don’t,” Yuri blurted. “Punish me if you want to, but leave him out of this.”

“Punishing you has proved to be useless time and time again. Perhaps this consequence will make you think twice before future recklessness.”

“What kind of sense does that make?!” Yuri couldn’t keep the strain of anger out of his voice. “I make you mad, so you screw over Flynn’s future? He had nothing to do with this.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before sneaking out again. Now go to your room.”

Yuri remained rooted in place. If he moved now, it would only be by storming off and the idea of being told to go to bed and then stomping upstairs was disgustingly juvenile. He didn’t know how he was supposed to act like an adult, however, when Alexei insisted on treating him like a teenager. Either he passively did as he was told like an obedient child, or he stood up for himself and demanded autonomy, like a kid throwing a temper tantrum. He couldn’t win.

“I said, go to your room.” Alexei made the choice for him by grabbing his bicep and jerking him forward. He shoved him at the stairs and Yuri stumbled, his bad back seizing up from the sudden movement.

“I don’t want to see your ugly mug any longer anyway.” After the manhandling, Yuri couldn’t have stormed upstairs even if he wanted to. For all Alexei talked about sending him to an expensive physical therapist and wanting to see him healthy and happy, he certainly didn’t put much effort into not worsening Yuri’s recovery.

Upstairs, Yuri fell onto his bed and stared at the ceiling. He pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at Flynn’s name in the contact list. The idea of messaging him and warning him about what Alexei planned to do in the morning wavered in his mind. In the end, he turned the screen off and dropped it on the mattress. What was the point? It wasn’t like Flynn could do anything proactive to head Alexei off. There was no point worrying Flynn over this when it wasn’t even guaranteed to ruin him. Yuri believed Alexei would make good on his promise to call, but he couldn’t guarantee that Flynn would be denied entry. Decisions could very well have already been made. Maybe this would turn out ok after all and Flynn never had to know his education was ever in jeopardy.

With that thin hope in mind, Yuri closed his eyes and let sleep come to him. He was so exhausted from the activity at the castle and now his fight with Alexei that he only briefly paused to wonder how Alexei had known with such confidence that Yuri had been at the castle.

* * *

Alexei swung open Yuri’s door the next morning and said, “Get up.”

Yuri blinked in confusion and glanced at his clock - six o’clock. He rubbed his face and said, “What the hell do you want now?”

“I’ll forgive your impertinence because you’re half asleep, but swear at me again and life will be much more difficult for you. Now get up and get dressed.”

Yuri, who had only fallen asleep a little under four hours ago, blinked sleep from his eyes as his feet hit the carpet. “Am I going somewhere?”

“You’re coming to work with me because you’ve more than proved I can’t trust you home alone. Now get up and be downstairs and ready to go in ten minutes.”

Alexei left and Yuri strongly considered going back to bed. He would have, if not for the fact that he suspected Alexei would pick him up and drag him out in his pyjamas if he tried it. So, ten minutes later he trudged downstairs in his baggiest jeans and leaned against the wall facing the kitchen.

“Sit. Eat.” Alexei, standing in the kitchen, pushed a bowl of cereal across the island counter and indicated the stool.

Yuri slunk into the chair and wasn’t surprised to see that the cereal was the cardboard-like bran concoction Alexei preferred. He suspected his box of chocolate and sugar desert masquerading as breakfast cereal had been discreetly thrown away. “What am I supposed to do at the station?”

“Don’t worry; I’ll put you to work.” Alexei pulled out his phone as Yuri began half-heartedly pushing flakes of crunchy paper into his mouth. A few seconds later, Alexei began his conversation. “Good morning. I hope I’m not disturbing you. …No, not at all, I haven’t left for work yet. …It’s actually about a prospective student.”

Yuri looked up sharply as he realized what he was hearing. If he thought shouting would give the dean of admissions a better impression of Flynn, he would have, but it would probably only confirm that there was drama surrounding Flynn that the school didn’t want to be part of.

“A friend of my son’s has applied this year. His name is Flynn Scifo. I’m sure his application looks good on paper, but as your friend, I thought it was my responsibility to warn you about him. He’s been a bad influence on my son for years and I doubt you’d want him on your campus.”

Yuri was too furious at the slander about Flynn to even be upset at Alexei calling him his ‘son.’ After a few more pleasantries, Alexei hung up and Yuri dropped his spoon in the bowl. “Ethics are just something that happens to other people for you, aren’t they?”

“You forced me to do this. You should ask yourself that question. Finish eating and go to the car.”

All the way to work, Yuri debated texting Flynn. By the time they arrived at police headquarters, Yuri still hadn’t. It just seemed pointless to tell him something had happened that neither of them could do anything about. There was always the chance that Flynn’s application was strong enough to overcome Alexei’s slander, and telling Flynn would needlessly worry him. And if it wasn’t…. Well, knowing that Yuri had screwed up wouldn’t change anything if Flynn was rejected. Flynn would believe he had simply been bested by more promising applicants without knowing he ought to hate Yuri. So Yuri put his phone away when they arrived and followed Alexei into the gleaming glass building in downtown Zaphias.

This wasn’t the first time Yuri had been to police headquarters, though it had been a while. In that time, very little had changed about the scuffed linoleum floors and potted trees in corners. On the fifth floor, they entered Alexei’s office and Alexei motioned to a leather couch against the wall. “Sit down.”

The couch wasn’t as comfortable as it looked, but Yuri sprawled out and made an effort to look like he was enjoying himself. He watched Alexei shuffle through the drawer of his desk and then returned to set a laptop and thick folder on the coffee table.

“This is a collection of reports going back five years. I need them catalogued in an Excel spreadsheet with the date and name of the person who filed it. It’s a tedious task I’ve put off doing for some time, but I think even you can handle that much responsibility.”

Yuri folded his arms. “And if I don’t?”

“I have many avenues to make your life, or the lives of your friends, difficult. Don’t try me.”

After what Alexei had done to Flynn this morning, Yuri didn’t doubt him. Petty defiance wasn’t worth making Flynn’s situation even worse. “Fine.” It wasn’t like forced, uncompensated labour was Alexei’s only crime. Alexei sat down at is desk to begin his own work and Yuri immediately checked the internet. He wasn’t surprised to discover that the laptop wasn’t connected to any networks, and all the networks in the building were password protected. A quick check through the Start menu also revealed that solitaire, minesweeper, and any other game had been removed from the computer. With tools of procrastination lost, he reluctantly opened Excel to try to get this over with.

Cataloguing reports was just as tedious as Alexei warned. Yuri struggled to stay awake and concentrate on the never-ending sequence of names and dates. He didn’t even know what the reports were for because reading them sounded even more boring than writing them up. He wouldn’t even have been surprised to learn that they meant nothing at all, and this whole task was a meaningless busy-work project Alexei invented to punish him.

Despite the tedium, Yuri worked hard. He wasn’t going to just sit here being bored. The sooner he finished this, the sooner Alexei had to find something else for him to do and interrupting Alexei’s day to deal with him was the only revenge he had. So, shortly before lunch, he pushed the laptop away and said, “Done.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m finished. What else do you have to waste my time with?”

Alexei, apparently disbelieving Yuri, came over to check the computer screen. He scrolled up through rows and rows of data and said, “Isn’t it astounding what you can accomplish when you apply yourself for once?”

Yuri stared at a space on the wall and daydreamed about punching Alexei in the face.

“If you’re done with that, I have another job for you that may last longer. Come with me.”

Yuri rolled his eyes behind Alexei’s back and followed him out of the office. They went down a few floors and down an unadorned hallway with one burnt-out light until Alexei stopped and unlocked a door. He opened it to reveal a room filled with dust and filing cabinets in long aisles. “This is the oldest of our records rooms,” Alexei explained. “The oldest cases are from the early 1900s, up until the 1930s. It’s notoriously difficult to find anything because over the years, things have been put away untidily so often that it’s a disorganized mess. It will be digitzied eventually, but for now, your job is to organize it.”

Yuri looked across the room and saw hours of his life pouring down a drain. This was going to take so much longer. “Great,” he said with forced enthusiasm. “Something I can do without sharing a room with you.”

Alexei gave him an annoyed look and then left Yuri to his chore. Yuri closed the door and sighed as he made his way to the filing cabinet in the farthest corner of the room. Might as well start at the beginning and work up.

Yuri coughed on dust after opening an old wooden drawer. He recalled Mom’s journal, and wondered if this was the same room Alexei had so helpfully brought her to and allowed her to search for clues. The little smiles Mom wrote around Alexei’s name made Yuri cringe. Not for the first time, he wondered if Alexei had always been like this. If Alexei was willing to hit him, had he ever hit his mom? Mom had always seemed so happy, and his issues with Alexei had ramped up slowly in the years after her death, but what if it had just taken a while to shift targets from her to him? He’d always believed that his mother’s death had broken Alexei in a way, and that the man he was now wasn’t the person he’d been when they fell in love. The most frustrating thing was that he would never know for sure.

Then another thought occurred to him, which was that the police report from Alice Tattersall’s death must be in here somewhere. Mom had pulled all her information from it, but what if there was a detail she had missed because she didn’t think it was important? He knew more about what had happened than she had, so maybe he could find something she hadn’t.

Yuri left the drawer from 1900 and moved onward, looking for anything from 1919. Unfortunately, Alexei was correct: the folders were all thrown together, with cases from 1910 sitting next to ones from 1915 and then jumping back again to 1902. Sorting everything into the correct year would be the easiest way to find what he was looking for, so he dumped a whole drawer on the ground and sat down to start sorting.

Yuri tossed folder after folder into growing piles based on year of the crime. He’d sort them alphabetically later. The task was mindless, and the hardest part was ignoring the ache settling into his lower back from sitting on the hard floor and hunching over files for so long. He must have been at it for almost an hour when he tossed a folder into the 1919 stack, paused, and then grabbed it again once his brain processed what he’d read.

It wasn’t the police report on Alice’s death, but two yellowed pages describing a break in at a funeral home. What caught Yuri’s eye was the date - April 26th, 1919 - and the memory of a mention of a break-in from his mom’s journal. The report described a broken lock on the funeral home’s door and muddy footprints on the floor. They had some evidence in the form of fingerprints made from a white powder on the door, but with no suspects to compare the prints to, they were unhelpful. In the end, not much effort was put into solving the crime because, curiously, nothing was stolen. Several pieces of expensive jewellery planned to be worn by the deceased at open-casket funerals had been in the building, but the burglar had ignored those. Yuri wondered if a burglar who did not burgle anything could still be classed as a burglar.

This was related to Nathaniel and Alice, he was certain. He just couldn’t put the pieces together to figure out how. Yuri put that file to the side for the moment and resumed his task of sorting. It was so mindless that he could think about it while he worked. Of course, once he actually started letting his mind drift while he worked, he just ended up thinking about how much he hated Alexei and hated this stupid chore.

The next time Yuri stopped was one hour and two drawers later when he stumbled across another folder dated April 26th, 1919. This one was also a break in, except this time the target was a bakery. According to the report, the money in the safe had been left untouched, and the only lost merchandise were three sacks of flour, each weighing about forty pounds.

Yuri stared at the page for a second, and then grabbed the report from the funeral home and spotted the detail about fingerprints left in white powder. The report didn’t specify what the powder was - maybe they lacked the forensic science back then to say for sure - but Yuri had a feeling had it had been flour.

Pieces clicked together. Before ending up in the the forgotten room where reports went to die at Police Headquarters, these had probably been from separate, though geographically close, police stations. Certainly, they had different signatures from different commanding officers. There had been no digital archives back then, or easy email communication between departments. It probably never occurred to them that their sister station was working a similar case only a few blocks away. Then they’d come here, on separate dates, and been haphazardly filed away in different drawers. In one hundred years, nobody had ever looked at them side to side. Why would they? A break in with sacks of flour as the only loss and another with no theft at all weren’t exactly high-priority cold cases to dig up.

Now Yuri was doing just that, and wondered why a person would steal three bags of flour and then go to a funeral home, look around, and leave. What would one even do with that much flour? If an equal amount of sugar, eggs, and butter had been taken, he’d imagine a giant cake, but what could you do with just flour? And what could you do with at a funeral home?

Except there hadn’t been flour all over the ground at the funeral home - just on the culprit’s hands, just what you’d get from carrying slightly leaking bags around. Yuri shifted his thinking. Say the thief hadn’t been after three sacks of flour. Say they’d been looking for three bags that weighed forty pounds, giving them cumulatively about a hundred and twenty pounds of weight. That was about how much a slim woman might weigh. Coincidence?

Yuri’s mom hadn’t mentioned, or maybe didn’t know, if the funeral had been open or closed casket. Considering the twisted and battered state of her body he’d seen in Nathaniel’s memory, closed casket would be likely. So someone had brought a hundred and twenty pounds to the funeral home and taken nothing. At least, nothing that was reported. Could an influential man have demanded his wife’s casket remain shut so that no one saw her in her tragic state? Or, could a wealthy man pay off a worker at the funeral home to pretend all was well? When pallbearers at the funeral carried the casket delivered by the paid-off worker, they would feel about a hundred and twenty pounds of weight and assume it was the weight of Alice’s body, but nobody would open the casket to actually check.

There was no way to know if this was truly how it had gone down or who might have been paid off. Anyone who knew what had happened had died decades ago and this wasn’t the sort of arrangement one would talk about or leave written records of. However, Yuri had a sneaking suspicion that if you attempted to exhume Alice Tattersall’s grave, all you would find were some very old sacks of flour.

Where had her body gone, then? He could only assume Nathaniel had taken it for some reason, but nothing of the sort had ever been found in the house. It hadn’t been among the skeletons exhumed from the basement, but that didn’t surprise him because he doubted Nathaniel would toss her in there to rot like the expendable servants. Yuri had found a secret passage that no one else had known existed in decades of restoration, so maybe there were yet more? Maybe Alice’s skeleton lay somewhere in the depths of the castle, gathering dust.

Nathaniel killed his wife and then took her body back home to do… something. Yuri didn’t know exactly what yet, but he could feel himself only inches away from understanding what motivation kept Nathaniel haunting the castle. He just needed to finish this obnoxious task and have a chance to talk it over with the rest of Brave Vesperia.

* * *

Flynn and Karol arrived at the castle on a wet Wednesday afternoon. This was the first time Flynn had been to the castle since the discovery of the bodies, and he wasn’t surprised to see that the tour group Estelle had just finished with only consisted of a few people. The castle had only re-opened from the police investigation on Monday, and people were still hesitant to go sightseeing at the city’s hottest new body dumping site.

Estelle waved when she saw them and hurried over to meet them. “Hi! I got your text. Are the others coming, too?”

“No,” Karol said. “Raven, Rita, and Judith are busy today. And Yuri….” He looked to Flynn with a grimace.

“Yuri is still incommunicado.” Flynn could only assume Yuri had been caught after coming home from the séance on Friday. He wasn’t sure what he feared Alexei had done to him, but he couldn’t forget Yuri’s joke about mysteriously vanishing while Alexei claimed he’d run away. Flynn doubted Alexei would go to such extremes as to ship him off somewhere, not only because he couldn’t imagine where, but he still doubted Yuri was in a good mood stuck at home.

“I hope Yuri is ok,” Estelle said. “Do you still want to look at the journal without the others?”

“Yeah!” Karol said. “That’s why we came.”

Now that they were allowed back in the castle, Flynn was eager to get a look at Nathaniel’s journal and see just what occult practises he was into. It had to be something to do with trying to contact his dead wife, and something that required him to kill innocent bystanders. Estelle had gotten clearance to take the journal out of the display case, and Flynn was armed with his phone camera to take pictures of any relevant pages.

Estelle led the way up the grand staircase. Flynn couldn’t help admiring the colourful portraits on the walls or the way the late afternoon sun shone on the wooden floor. He’d gotten so used to visiting the castle in the dead of night that he forgot how beautiful it could be in the daylight.

The third floor was deserted. “A lot of people didn’t come back to work,” Estelle said. “A lot of us have half-jokingly talked about the castle being haunted for a while now, but the discovery of all those bodies was too much for some people. My friend Megan, who worked at the front desk, said she wasn’t willing to keep working at a ‘murder mansion’ for minimal wage.”

“I can understand that,” Flynn said. “I can’t imagine how I’d feel knowing I was standing over a mass grave for years without knowing it. Does it bother you?”

Estelle shrugged half-heartedly. “Well… it’s a little creepy,” she admitted. “But the things I’ve experienced with you guys have been even creepier. The major downside is that the staff is spread pretty thin now and we don’t always have enough people on hand to keep two people up here at all times, especially since there are fewer tourists to warrant it.”

A month ago Flynn would have shrugged off that old superstition about the castle. These days, the prospect of a lone tourist wandering the third floor all alone worried him. “Do you send someone up when visitors are there?”

Estelle nodded. “That’s the plan. So far we’ve always had someone free to accompany visitors up in case there are any solo tourists, but it’s only been two days and we’re not in the busy season yet.”

Karol looked around the hallway like he expected a malicious ghost to jump out at any minute. “We gotta figure out what to do about Nathaniel before summer, or people might get hurt.”

Estelle took them to a small room at the end of the hall. After spending so much time in the meticulously restored house, it was off-putting to be in a room that would fit into any modern museum. Glass cases held artifacts from the house that were too significant to simply leave out, and display posters spaced around the room told their stories.

The journal Yuri had found sat on a blocky pedestal in a case full of other memorabilia from Nathaniel’s study. The plaque in the case briefly discussed Nathaniel’s interest in the occult, but hadn’t been updated to describe the contents of the journal yet. The journal itself was displayed closed. Estelle used a key to open the side panel of the case and pull out the journal. “Only I have permission to touch it,” she explained and then set it on a table in the middle of the room that had been printed with an aerial photo of the castle in 1920.

Flynn and Karol stood on either side of Estelle as she delicately opened the brittle pages. The smell of dust and decaying paper gave Flynn flashbacks to beating his head against a desk in the library two days before the LSAT. They skimmed over the pages Yuri and Rita had described - the ones outlining Nathaniel’s initial discovery of his psychic powers and his preliminary tests. They kept going until they found an entry dated three days after Alice’s death. In bold, underlined letters at the top of the page, Nathaniel had written: Necromancy.

“He wanted to resurrect Alice?” Karol said with a grimace.

“Maybe,” Estelle said. “But actually, the classical idea of necromancy wasn’t about, um, bringing people back like zombies. It was a form of divination. For example, in Pharsalia - a Roman epic poem written around the first century - a general sought out a necromancer to invoke the spirit of a dead soldier who could tell him whether his troops would win the imminent Battle of Pharsalus.”

Karol stared at her for a moment of silence. “How do you know that?”

Estelle seemed to shrink a little under Flynn’s and Karol’s stunned gazes and said, “Oh, well, I took an elective on classical literature and we read that one. The scene with the necromancer was really quite horrific. There’s also some necromancy in The Odyssey, but in that one, Odysseus travels to the land of the dead for answers rather than bringing them here so I didn’t think that was as relevant….”

Flynn smiled encouragingly. “You seem to be impressively well-read.”

“Wait,” Karol said. “Why would Nathaniel want divination? Didn’t he want forgiveness from his wife?”

Flynn shrugged. “I suppose the method if summoning a spirit to ask questions about the future, and summoning a spirit to ask if they forgave you, are the same.”

“And why would he need all these rituals, anyway?” Karol asked as Estelle began turning pages. “Couldn’t he just do a séance like Judith?”

“That I don’t know.” Flynn’s eyes ran over a page covered in Biblical verses and annotated with messy handwriting. The next page included sketches of skulls and diagrams that looked vaguely like alchemy, but Flynn wasn’t educated enough to recognize. “I suppose different psychic people have different abilities. Judith isn’t able to move things with her mind the way Yuri can. Or it could be that Alice never wanted to talk to him after what he did, so he needed something that would force her to show up.”

“Do you really think he tried some of these in real life?” Estelle paused on a page describing the need to wear the deceased’s clothes while eating unleavened black bread and rotting grapes.

“I’m thinking he did.” The next page included a drawing of the Kabbalahn Tree of Life, and Flynn was slightly amused to see he’d spelled Tiferet incorrectly in Hebrew.

“Ew.” A few pages later, Karol looked at the words cannibalize the corpse and crinkled his nose with disgust.

“I really don’t think he did this one,” Estelle said with a barely withheld grimace. “Look, it’s crossed out.”

Flynn didn’t want to know if Nathaniel had backed down from the one because he couldn’t bring himself to mutilate Alice’s corpse, or because by the time he’d found that idea, there wasn’t much corpse left to eat. Based on the pattern of dates, Nathaniel had been studying this for months.

“Actually, that makes me wonder,” Karol said. “Most of these rituals require the body of the dead person to be present. Alice was buried though, wasn’t she?”

Estelle jumped in to confirm, and then some. “Yes. She was buried three days after her death in the Elucifer Memorial Cemetery, which is only a few blocks away from the castle. Nathaniel was later buried with her. The headstone is quite large and easy to find.”

Flynn was certain Estelle had seen it for herself. “That is curious, then. Do you think we can eliminate all recorded rituals that require the deceased’s remains?”

“Why did he even write them down if he knew they wouldn’t work?” Karol asked.

“Just to be thorough, I guess?” Estelle turned to the next page, and then stopped. “O-oh… he’s found something with human sacrifice.”

Flynn looked sharply at the page. As the pages went by, it had become harder and harder to read Nathaniel’s increasingly desperate handwriting. Flynn was barely able to make out the words, the invocative power of human blood. “The murder victims.”

The page had no citation listed and Flynn wondered if Nathaniel had hobbled together a ritual from numerous other sources. It described a method of using freshly spilt blood - “the red blood of the virile living” - combined with an invocative circle to concentrate the energy. Flynn’s jaw tightened as he read; it required a lot of blood. There were other components - herbs to burn, images of the deceased to be placed strategically around the room, and the hour between midnight and one with which to do it. None of those chilled Flynn as much as a pencil diagram of a crudely drawn person hanging by their ankles over a circle on the ground. It looked as if Nathaniel had been plotting the most efficient way to extract the amount of blood he needed, and ended up on something the put Flynn horribly in mind of a butchered pig.

“This is awful.” Karol’s voice was faint.

Estelle replied with an equally wavering voice. “W-we can’t know for sure that he did this.”

Except that there were no further pages after that one. The yellowed paper carried a horrible sense of finality: he’d found his ritual.

“He’s so desperate to talk to his wife.” Karol was still unable to look away from the page. “It must not have worked, because he kept killing people over and over to do it.”

Flynn didn’t know if he was more disgusted or enraged. “Sometimes men just don’t know how to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Estelle took a photo of the page to remember for later and then returned the book to the case. “He’s a monster.”

“Let’s go,” Flynn said. “I don’t want to stay here much longer.”

They walked down quietly. Out of habit, Estelle took them down the hidden staircase to the study. Flynn couldn’t help running his hand over the wall where the elevator was, dwelling on the poor people who had been dragged down there and bled like a butchered animal so that a horrible man could force his wife to forgive him for murdering her.

They reached the entrance and were surprised to see Rita, Raven, and Judith on their way in. Rita perked up when she saw them. “There you are!”

“Hi, guys!” Karol forced a smile. “We didn’t think you could make it.”

Raven grinned broadly. “We were busy! Hey, what’s up? Y’all look kinda down.”

“We think we found out exactly what Nathaniel was doing,” Flynn explained. “It’s not pretty.”

Rita waved her hand. “Never mind that. I figured out how to get rid of the ghost.”


	13. Spider in a Cup

Rita led the way back to the van in the parking lot. Raven dragged open a door and Rita clambered in. To Flynn’s surprise, the great weapon she had come up with to destroy Nathaniel once and for all was… a battered old rug.

“We went antiquing this afternoon,” Judith said with a smile. “This rug was on sale, and I think it fits the decor of the house rather nicely, don’t you think?” The rug in question was round and made with an ornate pattern dominated by reds and blacks.

“Uh, yeah,” Karol said. “But why do we want to help with the castle’s interior design?”

“Because _this_ is what’s on the back.” Rita pulled the rug back to reveal its underside. All around the edge were symbols drawn in Sharpie. There were crosses, pentagrams, interlocking circles, triple spirals, and other icons Flynn didn’t recognize. “We made our own circle of witches’ marks.”

“Oh!” Estelle exclaimed. “Like the ones carved on the floor in Nathaniel’s bedroom.”

“Exactly,” Rita said. “I figured, if they could be used to keep him out of the circle, then it stands to reason that they can also be used to keep him in. So instead of worrying about exorcising his spirit or whatever, we just have to trick him into entering the circle here.” She shifted the rug around to show that a section of the ring was left blank. “And then slam the door shut, locking him in a cage.”

Raven grinned. “Then we can take the rug out of the castle and he’ll be dragged along with it, like putting a cup over a spider.”

“What do we do then?” Flynn asked.

Rita shrugged. “It won’t last forever. Eventually the rug will decay, of course. If we preserve it well, though, hopefully it will last long enough that he gives up and passes on out of boredom.”

Estelle leaned forward to run her hand over the ring of black marker. “These marks don’t look the ones on the floor in the bedroom.”

“That’s because we’re different people,” Judith said. “Symbols like these are only as powerful as the person drawing them believes them to be. After all, the ones upstairs are just a bunch of Vs and Ms. It’s only because the person carving them intended them to invoke the Virgin Mary that they had any real power. So, we made it with symbols that had meaning to us.”

“How are you going to close the gate?” Flynn rubbed his chin as he thought about this. “I doubt he’ll stand still long enough to sit and draw more symbols.”

“That’s what this is for.” Rita pulled out a piece of cloth with more symbols drawn, perfectly sized to fit into the missing gap. “Consider this the lid. Get him inside the ring, then slam the lid down. Once he’s trapped, we can secure it more efficiently with staples.”

Estelle said, “Sewing would probably be better.”

Rita shrugged. “I always use staples when you’re supposed to sew things. My hemmed pants hold fine enough.”

Estelle made a face. “You… hem your pants with staples?”

“Sure. It’s a lot more time-efficient than bothering with a needle and thread. Anyway, our job now is to figure out how to get him into the circle.”

“The symbols don’t need to be right-side-up, right?” Flynn asked. “That is, we can place it somewhere innocuous and trick him into walking into it.”

“Yeah, that’s probably the best bet.” Rita let the rug go so it fell back to looking like an innocent rug. “He also doesn’t need to be on the same level. The fact that while levitating as an astral projection, he couldn’t simply go over the barricade to reach his body, tells me that the barrier these creates extends up and down.” Rita held her palms up, parallel to each other. “I’m not sure if the barrier is infinite or if there’s some distance from the symbols that it fades out, but it has to be enough to cover the whole house if Nathaniel didn’t go over or under it to return to his body.”

Flynn concentrated on the rug while rubbing the stubble on his chin that he’d been so proud of finally growing. “If we placed it on the third floor, carefully measured its position, then used chalk on the second floor to remind us precisely where it is, we could lure him into the opening without him even realizing that there’s a trap there.”

“How do you propose we lure him in?” Judith asked.

Flynn dropped his hand. “I’m not sure about that yet.”

Raven said, “Right now, we oughta pace the rug somewhere in the house ta get it ready. Make it look like just an ordinary rug, y’know? If we come in carryin’ it and set it up right before we enact our plan, he might get suspicious of it.”

“Good idea!” Estelle said. “We should put it in the library. That room already got some new items recently because the chandelier broke so it was getting cleaned up. Plus, it’s underneath the master bedroom if he hits a wall, he’ll more likely assume he’s just closer to the barrier around the bed upstairs than he thought.”

Karol nodded. “That sounds perfect.”

While Rita and Raven rolled the rug up and carried it out of the van, Flynn said, “I’m going to call Yuri tonight. Hopefully I can get through to him and update him on the plan. If I can’t, I’ll go to his house in person and force Alexei to let me talk to him.”

Estelle took the rug from Raven and hefted it over her shoulder. “Whatever we decide to do, we have to do it this weekend. We only have permission to work in the house at night until the end of March.”

Flynn gave one quick nod. “This Saturday, then, we’ll end this.”

* * *

Flynn had an idea of how to lure Nathaniel into the circle, but he didn’t like it. In fact, he hated that he was the kind of person who would come up with it. What he knew was that they were trying to catch Nathaniel in a trap, and when you were setting a trap, you needed bait.

They knew that he targeted people caught alone in the castle. If they positioned one of them within the circle on the second floor, while the others waited to slam the lid shit on the third floor, it might work. The person who was bait would need to give a signal at the exact moment Nathaniel entered the circle, though. That plan would rely on the bait person being able to see Nathaniel coming and being able to alert the others when they did.

Because no one Nathaniel had targeted had ever lived to describe how it happened, they had no way of knowing for sure if any of those necessities were assured. It could be that Nathaniel could simply snatch a person and teleport them away in a split second. Whoever was going to be the bait would be put in extreme danger, and that was why Flynn had decided it would be him.

He got off the bus nearest to Yuri’s house. Judith had had success in showing up unexpected to talk to Yuri, and he hoped to have the same. When he reached the door, he knocked and waited. After a few minutes of no response, he tried again. When still no one answered the door, Flynn turned, faced the street, and thought.

The car wasn’t in the driveway, so Alexei was at work. If Yuri was home, he would answer the door in a heartbeat to get some distraction. The only reason he wouldn’t would be if he was sleeping, or perhaps laid up in bed and too sore to come down. Flynn looked around the deserted street and then headed to the gate to the backyard.

The key to not making it look like you were breaking in was to behave as if you had every right to be somewhere. So, Flynn didn’t sneak around as he reached over the fence, undid the latch, and entered the backyard. He had visited Yuri’s house often enough that even if he was spotted, he trusted that the neighbours would recognize him as being a friend. In the backyard, he picked up a small rock and chucked it up to Yuri’s window on the second floor. “Yuri! It’s me!”

There was once again no answer. Yuri’s bed was next to the window, so even if he was bedridden, he could still sit up and lean out. Flynn tried once again and the loud clatter would certainly wake Yuri if he was asleep. “Yuri?!”

If Yuri was anywhere in the house, he’d have heard the shouting. Yuri was either not here, or stuck somewhere in the house where he couldn’t come to the door. Once again, Flynn thought about Yuri’s joke about Alexei making him disappear. Yuri hadn’t seriously thought that was a possibility, right? It was just a joke… but also, where was Yuri? Had Alexei taken him somewhere?

Back on the street, Flynn knew where he had to go next. If anyone knew where Yuri was, it would be Alexei. So, he returned to the bus stop and and waited for the next bus that could take him downtown.

From there, he walked a few blocks to the police headquarters and went straight to the front desk. The chances of some stranger walking in off the street and getting a meeting with the chief of police were slim, so he would have to phrase this very carefully.

At the front desk, he put on his most “clean and hard-working university student” smile and said, “Uh, hi. I hope it’s not too much trouble, but my best friend is Chief Dinoia’s son and I really needed to get a textbook from him. It’s just, I’m not sure where he is and I can’t get in touch with him. My assignment is due tomorrow, so I was hoping Chief Dinoia could tell me how to get in touch with his son.” Flynn made his smile more sheepish than a wool sweater.

The woman behind the desk said, “What’s your name?”

“Flynn Scifo.”

“Let me see.”

Flynn waited anxiously as she picked up the phone. He could only hear her half of the conversation as she repeated things like, “Say’s he’s a friend of the chief’s son,” and “Mhm, Flynn Scifo.” Flynn imagined her getting jumped between various assistants before her call was finally patched through to Alexei himself, and then she once again repeated the story Flynn had given her. Flynn’s heart pounded because Alexei would know this was a lie. Yuri didn’t have any sort of textbook, but if Alexei knew someone was looking for Yuri, he would hopefully be motivated to prove he hadn’t kidnapped him.

The woman hung up the phone and Flynn nearly died from anticipation as he turned back to him. “Chief Dinoia says you can go up to his office, but keep it quick.” She handed him a lanyard with a visitor’s badge. “Fifth floor, third office on the right.”

Flynn’s nerves didn’t calm down on his way upstairs. By the time he reached the fifth floor and Alexei’s secretary sent him straight in, he thought he would get muscle cramps from the tension built up in his body.

Alexei looked up from his computer. “Ah. Flynn.”

Flynn stood ramrod straight. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Yuri doesn’t have any textbooks. What are you actually after?”

“I just want to know where Yuri is, sir. He hasn’t responded to texts for a few days and he wasn’t at home this afternoon. I’m worried about him.”

“There is no need for concern.” Alexei stood and approached Flynn, but to Flynn’s surprise, he kept walking to the door. “Come with me.”

Flynn had no idea where they were going. He reminded himself that Alexei might be a bastard but he wasn’t going to murder him and hide his body in a closet within police headquarters. The empty hallway with one burnt out fluorescent light and ugly linoleum floors they ended up at didn’t reassure him. When Alexei opened a random door and gestured for him to enter, Flynn half expected to be entering a dark closet where Alexei could threaten him away from security cameras.

It was with relief, then, that he entered and found Yuri sitting on the floor and surrounded by a carpet of folders. Yuri looked up in surprise. “Flynn? What are you doing here?”

“As you can see,” Alexei said, “Yuri is working for me now rather than getting bored at home. He is perfectly fine and there is no reason for you to worry.”

Tension flooded out. “I see. Thank you.”

“Be sure to hand your visitor badge in on your way out,” Alexei said before leaving.

The door shut and Flynn found a clear spot on the floor to sit.

Yuri spoke first. “Seriously, what are you doing here?”

“What do you think I’m doing? I was worried about you. You haven’t responded to any of us for days.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I haven’t had access to my computer or phone.”

Flynn frowned. “What… at all?”

“I am now extremely grounded. I could probably get my phone, actually, because I think Alexei leaves it in his briefcase in the living room overnight, but I wouldn’t put it past him to fingerprint the case in the morning to see if I went for it.”

There was a lot of information about the castle Flynn needed to share with Yuri, but all of that flew out the window in view of Yuri’s plight. “You can’t keep living there, Yuri. He’s treating you like a prisoner.”

“Yeah, well, my physical therapist would be pissed if I started sleeping on the concrete ground under a bridge and I’d like to not fuck my back up anymore than it already is.”

“And I’d like you to live a normal life like the independent adult you are.”

“You think I don’t? I’m working on it.”

“Go to my house. There’s a whole extra bedroom that’s just used to store things for now.”

Yuri looked shocked. “What, move in at your mom’s place?”

“Yes. She would love to have you.”

Yuri shook his head. “I couldn’t impose on her like that.”

“You wouldn’t be imposing. In fact, I would feel better if you did move in. It wasn’t an option when you first left the hospital because my mom isn’t in any shape to take care of someone, but you don’t need to be taken care of anymore. I worry about Mom being by herself, but if you lived with her, I would know someone was looking after her.”

Yuri shuffled folders and tossed a few of them into a pile. “That’s a good offer. I’ll keep it in mind for the future. Right now, I’m in a bit of a pickle because all my IDs, birth certificate, passport, whatever is in his possession. I don’t think he’ll just hand them over if I say I’m moving out.”

“He has to. They legally belong to you.”

Yuri snorted. “Yeah, ok, let me call the police about that, maybe they’ll help me, maybe they’ll even bump my case all the way up to the chief - oh wait.”

“This is infuriating”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” Yuri tossed another folder onto the pile. “So now I’m here doing stupid mindless work for no pay. But, it did work out somewhere because I found something interesting about Nathaniel.”

Yuri summarized what he’d learned about the break-in at the funeral home. By the time he finished, Flynn was eagerly nodding along.

“That’s perfect. It’s the final piece of the puzzle. We read his journal and we think we found the method he’s using to try to contact Alice, but it didn’t make sense because it required her body. If he stole it before it was buried, though, that takes that snag out of it.”

“What method is he using?”

Flynn opened his mouth but before he answered, he suddenly pictured Anya’s face and remembered he was describing how Yuri’s mother died. Yuri would be mad at him for sugar-coating it, but that didn’t mean he should go into gory details. “Human sacrifice, basically. He believes he can use the freshly spilt blood of the living to contact the dead. Standard occult ritual stuff - circles on the floor, done at the stroke of midnight, that sort of thing.” He didn’t want Yuri to ask for details, so he moved on as fast as he could. “But what I’m interested in is where, exactly this took place.”

“Where? You think that really matters?”

“It might. He brought Alice’s corpse home, and it couldn’t have been pretty after three days. He must have kept it somewhere away from the rest of the house. And he must have had some place to do his necromancy unseen by others. Was there space in the underground room you found?”

Yuri thought for a moment and then shook his head. “The hallway was pretty narrow. There could have been space in the room itself, but it was so full of corpses and their thrown-away belongings that you couldn’t have had a workspace there, at least not by the end of his reign as a necromantic serial killer.”

“There must another hidden room, then,” Flynn said. “A place we still haven’t found.” Flynn saw this as a potential ideal place to hide the rug after they’d caught Nathaniel. Once he was in the trap, they couldn’t risk some well-meaning custodian finding the rug and scrubbing the marks off. Flynn also wondered what would happen if someone rolled it up or folded it for storage, turning the ring into a half circle. Would Nathaniel get flattened into it, or released? Flynn was a sociology major, not math, so he didn’t want to even risk it. Dragging the rug into a secret room that only they knew about, however, would ensure that it remained untouched for many years. Yuri still didn’t know about that part of the plan, so Flynn filled him in as quickly as he could.

“Decent idea,” Yuri responded. “And hiding him away in a secret room until we find a more permanent solution is even better. There’s also the fact that every time we’ve found some secret hiding place in the house, it turns out to have some integral information. If he’s got one last hidey-hole in that mansion, I want to know what’s in it.

“Yeah, me too. Even if our plan works and we capture Nathaniel in the ring, I won’t be able to rest easy about the castle knowing there’s still one last secret room we haven’t found.”

Yuri frowned. “How are we gonna find it, though? No one has found it in fifty years, and I only found the last one with ghost help.”

“I think it will be up to you. You found both of the last ones - the elevator and the drawer. It could be that the reason no one has found it for all these years is that it requires telekinesis to open, like the drawer.”

Flynn was surprised at how hesitant Yuri was. Rather than agreeing and jumping at the excuse to get out of his house again, he looked down at his papers.

“If that’s the case, we might need to give up on this room idea.”

“What? Yuri, you’ve been to the castle loads of times. You can go again.”

“No, I can’t.” Yuri kept his face down and his tone terse. “I don’t know how, but Alexei will find out about it and I’ve hit my limit of how much I can put up with from him.”

Yuri wasn’t looking at him, and the hint of expression Flynn could make out was more defeated than angry, and that put Flynn back to worrying the same way he had when he couldn’t find him at his house. “Yuri, what did Alexei do after the séance on Friday night?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired of being at odds with him all the time. It’s exhausting.”

Flynn grabbed Yuri’s shoulder and forced him to look up to inspect his face. He searched for any trace of bruising, eyes darting to the collar of Yuri’s long-sleeved t-shirt. It was still cold enough that Flynn had no way to know if Yuri was wearing long-sleeves to stay warm or to hide a recent injury. “Are you alright? Did he hurt you?”

Yuri moved Flynn’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m _fine_ , honest.”

“You never back down. Not when Alexei’s pulling his crap. Not for something you care so much about. What did Alexei do to you that makes you not even willing to risk getting punished again?”

“Nothing!”

“Yuri! Alexei has to answer to people too, you know. If he hurt you, and you report it before evidence fades, we can take it above him and put a stop to his abusive power trip!”

“It’s not _me_ I’m worried about, so drop it!” Yuri snapped, and the flash of panic from the outburst showed he hadn’t meant to say that.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Oh, don’t start this again. Not you? Who else could Alexei hurt?”

Yuri debated speaking again, and then let out a pained breath. “I fucked up, Flynn. I fucked up, and I’m sorry, and Alexei sabotaged your chances of getting into Aspio.”

Flynn had been expected Yuri to admit a pain he himself had endured and didn’t know how to take suddenly being the victim in this conversation. “He… what?”

“He told you he knows the Dean of Admissions, right? He called him up and told a bunch of lies and discouraged him from accepting you.”

“No… how could he do that?” The path to a future at Aspio University had never been entirely clear, but now shadows poured over it, making it harder and harder to see.

“I’m so sorry, Flynn. He told me that he’d punish you to keep me in line, I didn’t listen, and now he’s ruined your dream and I am so sorry.”

Flynn’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t want to believe it, but he’d rarely seen Yuri looking so wretched and guilty. “Wait. He warned you he would do this and you didn’t listen?”

“The night I found the bodies. He threatened to ruin your career if I ever went back.” Yuri dragged his hands down his face. “I thought I could sneak out without him finding out, but somehow he always knows.”

Anger, helplessness, and sadness vibrated in Flynn’s chest. “You knew it would ruin my chances of getting in but you went anyway?”

“I’m sorry. Judith said she needed my help, and I thought the risk was worth it.”

“You thought the risk was worth it, but I was the one being risked. You never even asked if I thought it was worth it!” Flynn tried to reign in his temper. Yuri was doing his best to navigate a horrible relationship with Alexei. His life at home was awful enough to have been a pressure cooker for his psychic abilities. Those thoughts flashed through his head in a second before being replaced with the rage and disappointment of his dream dying. Maybe he was being unfair to Yuri, but in the moment, he didn’t want to be around him.

Flynn rose quickly to his feet. “I’ll search for the room myself.”

“If you really think you’ll need my help-” Yuri started getting up as well, but he had to grab the handles of the drawers and drag himself more slowly.

“No! If you go back again, Alexei will probably find a way to get U Zaphias to reject me, too!” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Yuri, I can’t talk to you right now.” If he stuck around here any longer, he was going to say something he regretted.

* * *

Yuri felt like crap for the rest of the afternoon. Flynn had every right to be furious with him and that made it even worse. It was good that he’d rejected Flynn all those months ago. Flynn had so much going for him in his future, and hooking himself to Yuri would be like tying himself to a lead balloon.

On top of his frustration with Flynn, Yuri was kicking himself for not asking more details about Nathaniel before the topic changed. Practically, knowing just how complex Nathaniel’s ritual was would hint at where his hidden room could be. Emotionally, Yuri couldn’t stop wondering what had happened to his mother. He knew that finding out the grisly details would just make him feel bad, but he already felt bad from all the awful scenarios his imagination cooked up.

If Alexei noticed Yuri’s dour mood, he didn’t say anything about it. When they walked inside, Alexei said, “Don’t go far. I’m going to start dinner.”

It might have been a friendly warning not to put energy into climbing the stairs, but Yuri didn’t trust Alexei to have meant it as anything other than a commandment. Yuri slumped onto the couch and turned the TV on while Alexei started pulling things out for dinner. He began to flick through the channels, looking for anything interesting, until Alexei said, “Put it on the news.”

Yuri rolled his eyes and gave up on watching anything entertaining.

A few minutes later, he heard Alexei opening cupboards all over the kitchen before he rounded the counter. “I have to go to the store. I want to believe that I can trust you not to get into trouble in the time I’ll be gone?”

“Of course not. I’m never in trouble until you’re around.”

Alexei didn’t appreciate his joke. “Just stay here and don’t get into anything.”

He left, and Yuri gratefully switched the channel to an old sitcom. He stared at the screen, not really paying attention to what was happening. Canned laughter filled the room, but Yuri’s mind was stuck on the idea that there might be a way for him to find out what happened to his mom after all. He’d seen Alexei come home with the case file for her murder. That probably wasn’t supposed to be brought home at all, so it had likely been a photocopy and likely hadn’t been taken back to headquarters. All the details on everything the police had found out must still be in the house.

His eyes drifted to the closed office door. Even when Mom was alive, he hadn’t been allowed to go in there. He’d heard somewhere that elephant babies are leashed around the ankle, and when they grow up, they’re so used to the rope restraining them that they don’t even try to escape even though an adult elephant could easily snap the rope. He felt now like an adult elephant suddenly realizing that ropes can break when it occurred to him that he could, in fact, poke his head in the office.

Yuri stopped at the door and debated the risk. Alexei hadn’t told him how long he would be gone, but the grocery store was ten minutes away. Assuming ten minutes there, ten minutes to shop, and ten minutes back, that should give him at least half an hour. He’d wast a little over five minutes already, he could be in and out in ten minutes with plenty of time to spare.

Yuri entered. It was a smaller room at the back of the house, with one window looking over the backyard. An L-shaped desk with a desktop computer took up one corner, while the opposite one held a dark wood bookshelf. Yuri directed himself to the sleek black filing cabinet sitting next to the desk. When he slid it open, the file he was looking for jumped out right away. It was right at the front, the latest thing Alexei had put away. Yuri spread it open on the desk and looked for a summary, because he wouldn’t have time to read the full report.

In his skimming, he founds bits and pieces that came together to form a greater picture. Physical evidence from the skeleton was limited considering all they had were bones, but forensics showed a splatter of blood on her sweater. Based on the size and direction of the blood spray, they believed she had had her throat slit while upside-down. Yuri put this together with Flynn’s story about Nathaniel being after blood and imagine him slitting her throat to drain the blood. The mental image made his own blood boil.

The police had no suspects. They believed that a long-dead member of the household staff had been the initial killer, and then a serial killer who found the hidden room had hidden out there and been inspired by the bodies he found. They had a profile suggesting the vague portrait of a white male well into his seventies by now, but no actual evidence. Yuri could feel the frustration in the report and he almost felt bad for them.

At least now he knew. He had hoped for more details, but even the bit about hanging upside down suggested the room needed to be a certain height. Yuri put the folder back and wondered when he’d be able to contact his friends again to let them know what he’d found.

He was about to close the drawer when another file label caught his eye: Yuri Phone. He assumed it was just the contract for his cellphone plan, but why was the folder so thick? He glanced at the clock on the wall; he should still have at least fifteen minutes for Alexei got home. That was enough for a peek.

As soon as Yuri opened the folder, he stopped cold. He was looking at a print-out of a chat log between him and Flynn where they had been discussing one of their trips to the castle. Yuri flipped to the next page and found logs from the group chat. Another page had no logs, but was a printout of an email to Alexei with the subject line “ _Restricted Area Alert_.” The message was short and to the point:

_“Yuri Phone” has entered a restricted area. The restricted area is shown below._

_To modify restricted areas, rename phones in your network, or turn off alerts, login to your account._

The attached picture was a screenshot of a zoomed-in map of Zaphias that had a transparent red polygon drawn around Zaphias Castle with a few blocks of buffer on all sides. A pin labelled “Yuri Phone” was positioned just within the polygon. The timestamp in the corner said the screenshot had been taken last Friday, at 11:48 PM.

So that’s how Alexei always knew when he went to the castle. He’d made all those excuses to explain how he always knew where Yuri was to avoid giving away that he was spying on his phone, but it had been as simple as getting a notification from an app. What else could Alexei see on Yuri’s phone? Could he record conversations? See Google history? His entire life had been on display to Alexei this whole damn time! How did this even happen? When had Alexei hacked his phone?

It wasn’t a hack, though. The printouts had the name of the app right there in the heading. This was something you could download, and Yuri bet that if he had ever tried to look, he would have found the app hidden somewhere, its icon invisible for stealth. He didn’t even have to wonder when the app had been downloaded. His old phone - the one he had bought himself and knew was clean - had smashed beyond usability on the theatre stage. Alexei had gifted this new one to him when he was still in the hospital. Yuri suddenly realized he should have wondered why Alexei presented it already out of the box and set up.

Everything he’d texted to his friends since getting this new phone passed through his head. He pictured the vulgar jokes and complaints about Alexei, and the conversation he’d had with Judith while still in the hospital and highly medicated, when he’d spilt his heart to her at 3 AM about his fear of never accomplishing anything in life. Alexei had seen all of that and the violation made him feel sick.

Then the front door opened. Yuri might have had a heart attack. No, it had only been fifteen minutes at most! A knife in his heart told him he should have considered that Alexei might just be going to the convenience store a couple of minutes away rather than the supermarket, and then that it didn’t matter why Alexei was back. He was, and Yuri was still in his office, and he had left the office door open. It took two seconds to determine that there was no way he was getting out of this. With flight out of the picture, Yuri grabbed the pages of evidence and marched into the living room to fight.

Before Alexei could tell him off for emerging from the office, Yuri shoved the papers in his face. “You want to explain this?”

Alexei snatched them away so swiftly it nearly gave Yuri a paper cut. “You know perfectly well you’re not permitted to intrude in my office.”

“And you know that spying is unethical, but here we both are. What the hell did you put on my phone?”

Alexei put the paper on the table in the front hallway. “’Your’ phone? Do you mean the phone that I purchased, which operates on a cellular plan that I pay for? Tell me, what part of that phone is yours?”

“You knew it was wrong to put that on there, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone through so much trouble to hide it from me.” He hated that Alexei knew him well. If Alexei had told Yuri the app was there in the hopes of keeping him on his best behaviour, Yuri would have found ways to work around it. You couldn’t escape from a leash that you didn’t know was there.

“I had every right to install tracking software on a device that I own.”

“So, what, you just sit up at night reading my conversations? You’re a fucking voyeur now?”

Alexei’s hand shot out and clamped around Yuri’s jaw. His fingers dug into Yuri’s cheeks, threatening to leave bruises. “How many times have I told you to watch your tongue? I’m monitoring you for your own safety. You are my responsibility and I will not see you come to harm, even by your own hand.”

Yuri struggled to form words with the fingers crushing his jaw. “Your hand, though, is just fine?” He should have expected that tightening that threatened to crack something.

“Did you ever think that if you mother had a GPS locater with her, it wouldn’t have taken ten years to find her body?”

Yuri grabbed Alexei’s wrist and tried to pull it off, but his right hand alone wasn’t enough and his left was still injured. “Get that shit off my phone,” he growled.

“No, I won’t. It will stay on your phone, and you will call me to verify your location when you’re out of the house on your own - which will not be for a very long time, I might add.”

Alexei loosened his grip just enough for Yuri to grab his wrist and twist away from his grip. “Screw this and screw you, too. I’m done with you treating me like your property. I’ve had enough of this shit and I’m out! I’m leaving!”

“Leaving? Where do you even plan on going?” Alexei sounded more amused at the idea than alarmed.

“You know the best part of leaving? That’s none of your god damn business. Keep the phone, and the laptop, too. I’m only taking the shit I brought here from my apartment, so don’t even think of trying to charge me with theft.” Riding high on a wave of fury, Yuri pushed past Alexei to head for the stairs and grab his stuff.

He didn’t make it. Alexei grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back with a death grip. “You’re not leaving.”

Yuri shook him off. “You’re the one who has my birth certificate - you should know I’m twenty-one now.” He started to move again.

Alexei grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked with enough force to remind Yuri of being strangled. He spun and slammed Yuri against the wall. The thud echoed through his throbbing head. “Do you really think I would allow you to go sleep under a bridge?”

Yuri pushed off the wall and Alexei clutched his left wrist. He twisted it behind Yuri’s back and Yuri’s whole body went limp from the sudden shock of pain in his elbow. The brace he still wore to keep it stabilized was useless in the face of solid pressure twisting it out of position.

“You’ve forced my hand. If you refuse to save yourself, I have no choice but to do it for you.”

Yuri gave one last shot at struggling out of Alexei’s grip, but only managed to hurt his arm even more. When Alexei twisted it further, he felt something click and the pain made him see white for a second. Glass shattered from somewhere in the kitchen, but Yuri was too distracted to check what item he’d accidentally channelled his anger into.

Alexei pulled him away from the wall. One hand continued gripping Yuri’s left arm behind his back, while the other steered him ahead by the shoulder. Without talking, Alexei forced him forward. They approached the front door and Yuri briefly thought he’d have a chance to make a scene in public, but instead they did a sharp U-turn to head down the stairs to the basement. Yuri didn’t fight on the stairs because the best case scenario involved breaking free of Alexei’s grip only to fall down the stairs and hurt himself more. On the ground, he wasn’t surprised when Alexei pushed him toward the spare bedroom and shoved him in.

Yuri stumbled forward from the force of the shove. By the time he was able to twist around and return to the door, it was already locked. “Open the door!” Yuri rattled the knob. He hadn’t touched the light switch yet, so the only light in the windowless room was the crack below the door. When he was younger, he hadn’t known it was abnormal for a bedroom to lock from the outside. As an adult, he appreciated how much of a bastard Alexei was for installing a lock like that just to have somewhere to put him.

“Calm down,” Alexei boomed through the door. “There’s nothing to be gained from having a temper tantrum. You’re going to stay in there until I figure out what to do with you and make any necessary arrangements.”

Yuri pounded his fist on the door. “Unlock the damn door, Alexei!”

Stairs creaked as Alexei returned upstairs. Yuri let his arm slump and he pressed his forehead against the door. While there, he reached over to flick the light on. He might as well make himself comfortable, because he would probably be here for a while.


	14. Boiling Point

Flynn sat on the bus and tried not to be mad at Yuri. He was mostly mad at Alexei, but he was so angry that some of it spilled over onto Yuri as well. If Yuri had just asked him how he felt about the risk, then… well, he’d still be upset but at least he wouldn’t have to be mad at his best friend on top of everything else. Yuri always did this. He bottled things up and acted like everything was fine, thinking he was protecting his friends from the pain of worrying about him. Except, there were times when it was clearly obvious that things were not fine, and Flynn had been trying to get Yuri to admit when he was suffering at home since they were teenagers. How was Flynn supposed to help him if Yuri refused to admit he needed help? It was the most frustrating thing, and more than a little bit insulting. Did Yuri think he was blind? Did Yuri think he was too fragile to be burdened with worrying about him?

This annoying self-sacrificing attitude of Yuri’s was frustrating enough when it only affected him. As soon as Flynn’s own future had been put on the table, though, Flynn had had a right to now what was happening. He didn’t necessarily blame Yuri for deciding to risk going to the castle, firstly because he couldn’t truly know what it was like to live under the thumb of an abuser and how he would react, and secondly because he probably would have agreed that the benefits of having Yuri present to help Judith at the séance outweighed the risks. If Yuri had just told him what was up, they could have made that decision together and sacrificing Aspio for the case could have been a decision Flynn made for himself. Considering how much Yuri despised Alexei trying to take his choices away, it pissed Flynn off that Yuri had now done the same to him.

He tried to tell himself that it was fine and that the University of Zaphias was a perfectly good school. It had served him well these past four years and their law department had plenty of excellent professors. It just wouldn’t have quite as many networking possibilities, or as many professors of the highest calibre, or the same prestige on his resume for years to come. Simply put, it wasn’t his dream school. He felt he was owed a bit of anger over getting that dream crushed through no fault of his own.

Flynn didn’t go straight home. He needed to read a chapter before class tomorrow afternoon, but he was in such a bad mood that he didn’t think he could concentrate on school work right now. For four years, his primary motivation had been the dream of getting into Aspio, and the prospect of staying at U Zaphias for another few years failed to light that fire.

Instead, he sent Sodia a quick text to expect him after dinner and got off near the castle. As he walked up the stairs from the parking lot, it struck him that as of next week, he couldn’t be coming here regularly anymore. After spending so many nights here, he would almost miss the place.

At the front desk, he asked for Estelle but learned that she wasn’t on shift today. Without her to walk around with him, his only option to wander the house was to join the next tour. A few minutes later, he was standing in a small group in the entrance hall and listening to a young man tell the story of how Nathaniel had died of unknown causes.

Not unknown, Flynn thought. It had been murder, and he had deserved it. Flynn wondered if the truth about Nathaniel would ever get out. The remains in the basement were far too old to give any useful evidence, and the only witness still alive was Mary. Her testimony would be thrown out the moment she brought up astral projection and witches’ marks, and the story wouldn’t make much sense with those pieces excised.

The idea that no one would ever know bothered Flynn. He wasn’t planning to practice criminal law - he was still juggling the ideas of being a children’s advocate or perhaps working for a humanitarian NGO - but he would drag Nathaniel to court himself if he had the ability. Too many people had died for him to be remembered as the quirky former owner of a tourist hot spot. It made Flynn furious to stand next to the grand staircase, mere feet away from where Alice’s body had lain after her murder, and listen to Nathaniel described as a decent man.

The tour moved on. By this point, Flynn suspected he knew more about the house than the guide did, or at least more about the secret history than any guides but Estelle. With nothing new to learn, Flynn ignored the guide’s spiel and focused on studying the house itself. He wanted to figure out where Nathaniel’s secret room could be. He might not be able to get into it today, but he hoped to at least get some ideas of where to look later. In the library, he spotted Rita’s rug blending in with the antique armchair near the window across from the door. It seemed too much to hope that the secret room would be in the library as well; it would be so simple to trap him in the rug there and then drag it across the room.

Based on the diagram of the victim hanging from the ceiling, it would need to be big enough for Nathaniel to manoeuvre around the victim. Alice’s body also needed to be there, so it would have to be wide enough to hold one prone corpse, one thrashing victim, and one working man. Then, it would need to be at least as tall to accommodate a person hanging upside down, with space below to catch blood.

Knowing those dimensions ruled out a good portion of potential hidden spots he noticed on his tour. There were sections of the house where walk-in closets obscured the perception of how deep a room was, but not to that degree. In other places, Flynn thought a hidden space might be under the stairs, but the sloping roof would force the victim right to the front of the room and he couldn’t imagine it working.

And then there was the screaming issue. He didn’t know how Nathaniel captured his victims or what precautions he took, but on the chance that they were still awake when he killed them (though Flynn dearly hoped they were not), their screaming would have alerted the rest of the house’s residents. Mary, at least, would have mentioned that to him in her testimony. That suggested the room was either even bigger to accommodate thick and thorough sound proofing, or else it was underground.

When the tour reached the basement, Flynn began searching every corner for a possible entrance to a hidden room. It made sense that Nathaniel’s secret space would be underground; after all, his first one was. It would probably be even deeper than the basement like the first one, too, for even better sound-proofing. The entrance to the first one had cunningly been built into the elevator shaft. Constructing it would have gone unnoticed, because anyone seeing the construction workers digging in that part of the house would have assumed it was part of the elevator. It also took advantage of the built-in structural support already in place for the elevator. It was the perfect place to hide a secret shaft, so where else might one be? He could really use a ghost to whisper in his ear and point it out to him.

When the tour was over, Flynn thanked the guide and then went up to the museum level to extend his time in the house. “Think, Flynn,” he whispered at his reflection in a glass case holding a mannequin in an Edwardian gown. “If you can’t figure this out, maybe you aren’t smart enough for Aspio, anyway.” It had been an attempt at a joke, but even with an audience of only himself, it fell flat.

He wasn’t going to find the room by wandering around. It was probably underground, and the entrance could probably only be found with Yuri’s telekinetic powers anyway. He was wasting in his time here, so he might as well head home and get started on that reading. Aspio University may be out of the question, but he still needed to graduate to at least get into Zaphias’ law school.

* * *

The last time Yuri had been locked in the basement, he had been seventeen. He’d come home from a party thinking he was subtly buzzed, only to find out he was overtly tipsy when confronted by Alexei. Getting shoved into the basement and told to sleep it off had been a welcome relief after a long scolding about life choices and considering how they would reflect on Alexei as the chief of police. Sitting in silence had been a blessing after that lecture, though Yuri had grown bored of the isolation after the third day.

Yuri nursed his injured elbow as he sat on the bed. He’d taken the brace off to inspect it, which turned out to be a mistake because now it was swelling like mad and he couldn’t put it back on. His whole elbow was pink and inflamed and the only mercy was that he could still move it. Moving it hurt like hell, but it was moving. That meant it hadn’t broken all the way through again, though he remembered the dull crack he’d felt and didn’t discount the idea that the freshly-healed fracture had shifted. If he had to wear a cast and a sling for another month because of Alexei, he was going to punch something.

Of course, he would only get that cast if he got to the hospital. Yuri shifted to get more comfortable, and the movement made the pain spike. He hissed to release it, and then wondered if he could use this to his advantage. Holding it close against his stomach, he returned to the door and pounded on it. “Alexei! Get down here!” The door shook under his fist. “I mean it, Alexei!”

Yuri kept pounding and shouting for close to five minutes. His right arm was starting to hurt as well. He didn’t stop until he finally heard footsteps pounding down the stairs and Alexei’s angry voice, “Cease that racket immediately.”

“Great, I got your attention. I need to see a doctor.”

“You do not. Lie down and be quiet.”

“You twisted my arm and broke something. The swelling’s getting pretty bad. You’re the one who paid for all the therapy so I could use it again; you’re wasting your own money if you let it get fucked up now.” All he needed was to get out of this house. If he got to a public place, Alexei wouldn’t be able to force him back into the car to go home.

Unfortunately, Alexei knew that, too. “Twisting your arm like that is hardly enough to break anything. I’ve performed that manoeuvre on suspects hundreds of times.”

Yuri rolled his eyes. “Ever done it on an arm that’s already broken?”

“Your arm already healed. Stop whining and don’t disturb me again.”

His footsteps retreated and Yuri thumped his forehead on the door. So much for that plan. He returned to the bed and grabbed the pillow. Using his teeth as a second limb, he tugged the case off, and folded that into a triangle. It took some finagling and he had to use his throbbing arm to tie the knot, but he managed to make an impromptu sling. After that, there was nothing else to do in the room but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

What was Alexei planning, anyway? Alexei had said he needed to make plans and arrangements, which was a nerve-wracking prospect. When he was younger, Alexei had threatened to send him to one of those camps for troubled teens to whip him into shape. Did they make those for adults? He couldn’t imagine keeping someone there against their will was legal, but he also wouldn’t put it past them to say he was welcome to leave whenever he wanted, as long as he was willing to trek twenty miles through wilderness to the nearest town with a bus station.

Yuri closed his eyes and pulled his right arm over his forehead. He could figure this out. At the very least, he wouldn’t be going anywhere quietly.

* * *

Yuri didn’t remember deciding to fall asleep, but suddenly a banging on the door woke him up. For a few seconds, he looked around at the beige walls in confusion and tried to figure out why his bedroom looked so different before remembering where he was.

“Yuri. Answer me.”

“What now?” He pulled himself out of bed to hear Alexei better through the door. There was no clock in the room, so he had no way of knowing if he’d slept for twenty minute or five hours.

“A young woman called your phone. She wants to know if you know where Flynn is.”

Still half-asleep, Yuri could only frown in confusion. “What…? Who? Why would I know where Flynn is?”

“She claimed to be his roommate. I don’t know why she thinks you know where he is, but I informed her I would get back to her with your answer.”

“No. He didn’t say anything. What time is it?”

“Quarter to eleven. I’ll inform her that you don’t know.”

Why was Sodia calling him to ask about Flynn? Was he not answering his phone? Flynn sometimes went radio silent if he was studying for an exam or spending a weekend writing a paper, so that didn’t in itself alarm Yuri, except the library was closed by now so he would be squirrelled away in his bedroom if that were the case. Yuri couldn’t imagine anything that would keep Flynn out this late, at least nothing that didn’t also involve him.

Where the hell was Flynn, then? Why wasn’t he answering his phone? It was almost eleven. Something was wrong. What had Flynn said before he left? He’d said he was going to search for the hidden room alone, but surely he had just meant without Yuri, and that he’d go back the next day with the rest of the team. Flynn couldn’t have gone to the castle by himself, could he?

A horrible sinking feeling in his gut said that he had. Flynn had gone there to look for any sign of the hidden room and now he wasn’t answering his phone. He should be home now, and he wasn’t, and he had been at the castle alone.

“Fuck,” Yuri hissed, panic making it hard to think straight. Flynn wasn’t stupid enough to wander around the castle isolated from everyone else, but he had gone by himself and might have lost track of where other guests were. Now he was missing and Yuri felt like he was sitting on his bed, waiting for Mom to come home all over again.

He came to his senses again when he heard Alexei leaving. “Wait!” He slammed the door for emphasis. “You need to call Judith, or Raven, or any of my friends. Tell them Flynn has gone missing in Zaphias Castle.”

“You have no way of knowing that,” Alexei replied. His voice was harder to make out; he was still standing by the stairs.

“I do. If you won’t call them, let me out so I can help him.”

“You’re not getting out of your punishment by pretending that an adult not responding to his phone for a couple of hours is a crisis.”

Yuri slammed the door again. “Listen to me! Flynn is in trouble. If you don’t do anything about this, he’s going to be the next body you find in the basement.” The image of Flynn’s bloodied corpse sprawled on the floor of the secret room, left to rot, forced Yuri to squeeze his eyes shut to purge his mind.

“I’ve worked missing persons cases since before you were born, Yuri,” Alexei said tiredly. “We need much more than a university student being out at 11PM to declare someone missing.”

“Listen to me, Alexei!” Yuri rattled the doorknob. “Alexei!”

There was no response. Yuri tried getting him to come back for another minute, but gave up when it was obvious Alexei had left the basement. A torrent of profanity rushed through his mind. Flynn was missing. Flynn was in the castle. Flynn was missing just like his Mom had been. Flynn was in the castle.

He needed to get out of here, but it was impossible. Years ago, he’d tried everything he could think of and determined there was no way out. Until that door was unlocked, he wasn’t going anywhere, but by the time Alexei let him out, Flynn would already be….

Yuri forced himself to stop thinking about that. He stared at the door with mounting frustration, until he suddenly remembered a thought he’d had earlier today. Baby elephants learned they couldn’t escape their restraints, so they didn’t even try once they were adults, even though the adults had the strength to break out. Yuri clutched the doorknob and realized that this wasn’t the same situation as when he was a kid. He had an ace up his sleeve this time, and as long as he made it out of the house, he could get to Flynn.

Yuri pressed his hand over the lock. He understood how lock picking worked in theory. A lock had chambers with pins at staggered heights. A key was perfectly fitted to them in order to push the pins up into the chambers so that the lock could turn unimpeded. He didn’t have a key, nor did he have a pin to reach into the lock to pick it, but he could move things with his mind and that had to be worth something.

He closed his eyes and pictured the lock in his mind. It would be easier if he knew exactly what the pins looked like, but he just needed to smash all of them up into the chambers. He put his mind to it and heard something click. He twisted the knob, but was still left with resistance. Damn, didn’t get all the pins. He tried again, forcing himself to relax and focus. Every time he thought about Flynn, panic flooded into him again and he couldn’t concentrate. He knew he had the strength to do it, but he wasn’t practised at actually controlling his power yet.

Yuri took a deep breath and tried to calm down to focus. He pictured all seven chambers and then slammed his thoughts forward, urging them to lift. They clicked again, but he still hadn’t quite gotten it. Yuri grunted in frustration and punched the door. He wished this had a deadbolt instead, because at least then he’d have just one metal piece to slide out of the way.

He needed a precise, focused burst of power. Yuri grabbed his busted elbow and squeezed. The shock of white made him gasp and he slapped the door at the same time he urged the lock open. The pain much have worked to shock the power out, because the lock clicked again and this time, the knob turned when he tried it. “Gotcha.”

Yuri stepped into the basement and listened for the sound of the TV. The room upstairs was quiet, so Yuri hoped that meant Alexei had already gone to bed. Yuri went to the stairs. He was going to go out the front door, no hesitations. He pictured everything in his bedroom: clothes, beloved posters, mementos from times with his friends and his mom - everything he owned in the world, put simply. His computer was a write off because it was also a gift from Alexei and likely contaminated with just as much spyware, but everything else he wished he could take. He wouldn’t be able to sneak up and back down with a suitcase without Alexei noticing, though, and after today, he planned to never set foot in this house again.

At the top of the stairs, he faced the door. This was it - he was about to walk away from everything he owned and try to start over again from nothing. It was daunting, but it was still a better future than whatever Alexei had planned for him if he stayed here.

Yuri went for the door. He grabbed his shoes from the rack and planned to put them on once he got outside. He straightened up just as Alexei walked out of his office. The two of them locked eyes for a second, and then Yuri’s hand shot for the doorknob.

“Stop right there.”

Yuri spun around, saw Alexei striding toward him, and he didn’t even think. He threw up his arm and imagined bringing it down on Alexei’s head. Instead of punching Alexei in the face, he slammed his arm down and dragged the bookshelf with it. Alexei only had half a second to react, and he wasted it being surprised. The tower of heavy wood and books slammed Alexei to the ground with a thunderous crashed. In the stillness that followed, Yuri wondered if he had accidentally killed Alexei, and only felt a little bit guilty that this concern was based on fear of legal trouble.

Then books shifted and the shelf wobbled as Alexei started to move beneath the wreckage. “Yuri, wait. I’ve only ever wanted to help you.” His voice was muffled by the pile of books. “I did it all for you - for the sake of your mother!”

“See you in hell.” Yuri stuck up his middle finger and held it over his shoulder as he walked out the door.


	15. The Last Séance

It seemed to take forever to get to the castle. Yuri had walked out of his house without a coat or his wallet, so waiting for the bus had been a freezing affair. When it finally came, he snuck on the back and mimed tapping something on the card reader to pretend he had a transit pass. Considering the time, no one was alert enough to care. He vibrated all the way to the castle.

Yuri was trapped in a limbo of stress. The thought that he might have seriously injured Alexei and thus opened major legal trouble for himself pushed him forward while the terror of Flynn’s potential fate drew him. Behind him, his mother. Before him, Flynn. The terror of potentially reliving the worst day of his life made him feel physically sick. So many horrible images of what the future would hold if he didn’t get to Flynn churned around inside him until he wanted to vomit them all out.

The bus seemed to move at a crawl. Every time they stopped to let someone off, Yuri mentally swore at them for slowing him down. He even found himself praying, throwing in plenty of apologies for failing to do so for so many years and admittance that he definitely ate too much bacon to come crawling in for help now. He didn’t even believe in any sort of god, but at the moment he really wished there was a benevolent deity who would intervene to save Flynn and was willing to throw thoughts into the void just in case hoping a god existed made it so.

What he couldn’t stop thinking about was how his last conversation with Flynn had been an argument. Flynn was right to have been mad and Yuri hated himself for not telling Flynn earlier. It wasn’t fair, Yuri thought, that people were allowed to die without giving you any warning. You couldn’t go around treating every parting like a potential final farewell, even though every parting was a potential final farewell, but that was how you got little boys crying because the last thing they’d said to their mom was a distracted, “Ok,” with eyes still on a video game. If Yuri had known that Flynn would walk out of the records room and potentially out of Yuri’s life forever, he would have said… he would have told him….

Yuri didn’t know what he would have said specifically, because the thought of trying to compress everything he felt about Flynn into a few words was a greater task than his mind was capable of focusing on at the moment. He just knew that somewhere in there, he would have included an, “I love you.”

Flynn wasn’t dead, though - at least not yet. If Yuri got to the castle in time, he could keep it that way. Nathaniel’s ritual called for performing the act in the hour of midnight, which meant Flynn would still be alive at least until twelve, though by the time he arrived at the castle, Yuri had no idea what time it was. He also had no way to contact his friends and ask them for help. He would have to take care of this himself.

Yuri took the stairs up to the castle rather than the sloping driveway. They were faster, but by the time he reached the top, his back was killing him. He ignored this and strode to the front door. Usually, they relied on Estelle with the keys to let them into the castle at night. This time, Yuri threw his hand forward and let a combination of pain in his arm and fear for Flynn focus his energy.

The door swung open and Yuri strode into the moonlit entry hall. As he searched the area before him, the front door behind him slammed shut. Yuri startled and spun around, finding no one. “Alright. That’s how we’re doing it tonight, huh?”

Distantly, a grandfather clocked chimed only once, signalling the quarter hour. He had forty-five minutes to find Flynn in this big, labyrinthine house full of hidden passages, with no flashlight, no phone, and no idea where to start. All he had were untrained psychic abilities and the knowledge that if he failed, Flynn would die. So, that should be plenty.

* * *

Zaphias Castle was far too large. Only a single family had lived here, so why did they insist on having so many rooms? Yuri searched a servant bedroom on the second floor, trying to find a balance between rushing against the clock, and going slow to search meticulously. Making his job harder, he decided not to turn on any lights. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and the last thing he needed was for people to see lights on in the castle and call the cops.

He tossed a pillow at the wall in frustration. Why was he even wasting time here? Of course Flynn wasn’t in this part of the house. If Nathaniel had a secret room, he wouldn’t have put it among the servant quarters. Flynn was in trouble and he was looking under beds in case he found a trapdoor, even though he knew the only thing under here was the kitchen. He’d already spent twenty minutes searching the basement, certain the room had to be underground. He’d checked every wall, inspected the floor in the wine cellar, and even searched the pantry in the cafe in case they had somehow missed it while constructing the kitchen and gift shop next door.

He’d heard the clock chime the half hour about ten minutes ago. He was down to twenty minutes and still had no leads. It felt surreal that it had already been twenty-five minutes, because his heart and mind raced so quickly that it felt like barely a minute had passed since arriving in the castle.

He returned to the hallway and tried to figure out where to search next. His whole body hummed in tension from the joint need to run ahead and keep looking and the need to consider where to look next carefully to make the best use of his time. He was so tense that the tingling of a distant bell almost made him snap. It took a full second to process that he was hearing it, and another to remember what the others had said about the bells jingling in the kitchen. Yuri took off, backtracking down the servant’s hall to use the smaller staircase that would let him out right by the kitchen.

A small and desperate part of him expected to see Flynn waiting for him in the kitchen. Flynn wasn’t there, and neither was a ghost. All the kitchen held was that row of bells, one of which jingled as he watched. Yuri squinted through the dim light and just barely made out the word ‘conservatory.’ Hope sparked again. Last time, Flynn and the others had been summoned to the study by a ghost trying to get them to find the secret room. This had to be the same thing. Any ghosts of murdered victims still in the castle must know what was going to happen to Flynn in twenty minutes and wanted to help Yuri get to him in time.

Yuri crashed through the windowed door to the conservatory. Flynn wasn’t here, either, and the distant chime of quarter to midnight made that even worse. Yuri walked across a chequered marble floor that gleamed in the moonlight. Small trees and flowering bushes sat in planters along the walls, but the centre of the room was empty. Yuri ducked under the velvet rope to venture further into it.

“Hello?” Yuri waited to feel that tug in his mind that had told him to inspect the mantle. He tried to feel spiritual emotions that would confirm a ghost was present and just as scared for Flynn as he was. He sensed nothing, but maybe that was because his emotions were working in overdrive and he had no brain space to spare on anyone else’s. “Flynn?!”

Overhead, a dome of stained glass depicting hundreds of little green and red flowers helped his voice resonate around the room. “This better not be a waste of my time!” He slowly turned in a circle, desperate to see anything that could help and justify taking precious minutes out of his search to come here.

Something crunched. The sound was so small that if he wasn’t totally alone in a room quiet as a library, he wouldn’t have heard it at all. He couldn’t tell where it had come from and kept scanning the area, searching for any sign of movement.

Then he heard a slightly louder crack, which was just enough of a warning to dive forward at the same time that the entire glass dome crunched and then shattered.

Yuri landed hard with his right arm wrapped over his head and his left crushed painfully underneath him in its sling. Glass shards rained over his lower legs and struck the ground with a crash that might literally wake the dead. When the falling glass finally fell silent, Yuri crawled forward and twisted onto his ass. Cold wind blew over him through the new hole in the ceiling, which also let in enough moonlight to see shattered glass littered across the floor. He stared at the wreckage of the dome and imagined some of those hand-sized fragments dropping on his head and neck.

Yuri didn’t think for one moment that the dome had cracked at random. Someone had been trying to hurt him - or even kill him - and it didn’t take a Rita-level intellect to figure out who. Yuri felt stupid for walking right into Nathaniel’s trap. He already knew from the first séance that Nathaniel wasn’t above pretending to be someone else, so he should have considered that it might not be the same helpful ghost summoning him this time. He would have kicked himself, except a playing-card-sized fragment of glass had cut through his jeans and slashed along his calf, just above his ankle.

Yuri picked up the bloodied glass to check how deep the blood had stained along the edge. The wound stung, but it didn’t look so deep that he’d be in danger if he didn’t bandage it immediately. He was about to drop the glass, but then looked at it closer. It couldn’t hurt to have a weapon. The glass was slightly curved from being part of the dome, and cracks extended up the centre like a branching tree. Small and smaller cracks extended out of the main one - cracks within cracks, snaking away into invisible weaknesses in the glass.

A bead of blood ran from the edge of the fragment into a crack, seeping along the seam. A hairline crack he hadn’t even seen with his naked eye was now highlighted in red. Cracks inside of cracks….

There was no better place to build a secret room than the one he’d already found. The elevator shaft leading to it was so perfectly concealed within the larger elevator shaft. Why had Nathaniel built a hallway with one room branching off of it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to exit the elevator directly into the hidden room? Why did the hallway continue on for several more feet and then end in a blank wall? The set up looked like a second room was meant to be there, but there was no door. It was just a solid wall… unless the latching mechanism was inside the wall, just as the hidden drawer had been imperceptible from the outside.

Yuri jumped to his feet and ran. Ten minutes, and Flynn was dead.

* * *

Flynn’s head hurt. He wasn’t sure where he was, or what time it was. He got the sense that he had been asleep for a while, but in the complete darkness of the room, he wasn’t sure if he had napped all afternoon or all night and into the next morning.

Except he definitely wasn’t in his bedroom. The cold stone floor beneath him and the tight rope around his wrists was proof enough of that. Flynn straightened up from his slumped position against the wall and felt every joint in his body ache and groan. He must have been out for some time if he’d been able to get this stiff. Several hours, at the minimum. Several hours since…?

Flynn tried to piece together what he remembered in search of clues for where he was now. He remembered an argument with Yuri and then he’d… gone to the castle. Yes, that’s right, and he’d followed a tour around looking for the secret room. Then he’d decided to go home, and had noticed that he was the only person still on the second floor when passing through. He’d gone to the staircase in the study as a shortcut down and then…. He couldn’t remember anything past that. Flynn tried to find a comfortable position, but as he was sitting on the stone ground and leaning against a brick wall, it evaded him. At the very least, he thought, he had probably found that hidden room.

Getting out of here was the only thing that mattered. If he was still here when Nathaniel returned to attempt his ritual, he was going to end up like the skeletons in the basement. First he had to stand up, which would be easier if his ankles weren’t tied together. Flynn wiggled his legs, but there was no give. When he moved his legs toward himself to scoot up the wall, he met resistance. The rope on his legs was anchored to another point. He lifted his legs and pulled, testing its tautness, and determined that the rope was long enough for the anchor to be on the ceiling. He pictured the diagram of a victim hanging by the ankles and cringed.

He could still get up, though. Flynn slid forward on his ass until he had plenty of slack from the rope. Then he pulled his legs in and did a lot of wiggling, rocking, and using all the leg muscle he had to push himself upright. There had to be something in this room that he could use to escape. Bitterly, he guessed there was a knife somewhere and if he found it, he could use it to cut the rope before it cut his throat.

Flynn hopped until he bumped into a table. He fell, but he fell into the table so managed to stay upright. Items on the table jostled from the bump. Flynn turned around so his hands could feel for a knife. He might find it by cutting his finger on it, but that was better than waiting to get killed. His fingers ran over rough wood until they hit something smooth and round. Flynn thought it might be a bowl, until he kept feeling up and the curve kept going. Confused, he moved his fingers sideways and they sank into an eye socket.

Flynn jerked away from the skull with a jolt of revulsion. It was a hundred years old, he told himself, but that didn’t make him feel much better. It also didn’t help with the outrage that Alice’s body had just been lying on this table, gathering dust for a century. Nathaniel said he loved her, but if he did, he’d leave her body to rest in peace.

He continued moving down the table. At the other end, where Alice’s feet would be if he dared feel for them, his fingers ran over sticks of chalk. That was useless to him, but then his hands found a knife. Hope bloomed; as soon as he cut his hands and ankles free, he could concentrate on finding the door to this place. The thought occurred to him that the door could very well be impossible to open without telekinesis, making him effectively trapped in a sealed box, but he wasn’t ready to dwell on that possibility.

He dragged the knife toward him. He would slide it off the edge of the table just enough that he could then pin it there vertically and saw the rope around his wrists. Flynn got the knife over the edge and pressed into position and was cheering on his success when the rope at his feet suddenly snapped taut.

The knife dropped to the ground as Flynn’s feet were jerked out from under him. His head crashed onto the table and he saw stars as the rope continued to pull, dragging him across the ground and then into the air. He finally came to a stop, though that was only half true because he was still swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The swinging motion exacerbated his headache and somehow the world spun despite it being so dark that he was effectively blind.

He was finally able to think again when he slowed to a gentle sway and his headache went from hula-hooping around his skull to settling faintly at the back. “Shit.” Had this been a reaction to him going for the knife, or was he just frustratingly a few seconds too slow? Either way, the knife was no longer a viable escape plan. The next thing he could do was kick his legs and hope for some give, and then twist and struggle in the hope of reaching his feet with his hands still bound behind his back.

Both of those plans led only to him increasing how much he swung, which in turn increased the magnitude of his headache. After realizing he was getting nowhere but a worse headache, he gave up and let himself swing to a gentle sway again. Flynn closed his eyes, although it didn’t make difference, and considered his options.

He couldn’t get out of here by himself; that much was clear. He would need to wait for someone to get him down, and he didn’t like the odds of that person being a friend rather than Nathaniel disposing of his corpse. He had to face the facts: in all likelihood, he was going to die here.

The thought moved from his head into his chest, where it expanded and took root as a dull ache of dread. Suddenly, Aspio University didn’t seem like such a big deal. Aspio and Zaphias both had fine law programs; he should consider himself grateful to go to either. Plenty of people didn’t get into their first choice school, plenty of people didn’t get accepted to law school at all, plenty of people didn’t make it to university in the first place, and plenty of people were dead and unable to have a future career at all. Now that he was imminently to be among the latter category, he felt like an idiot for being upset about being in the first.

He shouldn’t have made such a big deal of it to Yuri. Even if Yuri had told him about Alexei’s threat, Flynn would have agreed that sneaking out for the séance had been worth it. Telling Flynn what was going on wouldn’t change anything about Alexei’s reaction. Getting mad at Yuri for not telling him hadn’t gotten him into Aspio, and it certainly hadn’t helped him avoid a grisly fate in a secret murder room. The only thing he’d accomplished by getting mad was ensuring that his final conversation his best friend - with the guy he loved - had been an angry one. He was going to die tonight and the last memory Yuri would have of him was getting yelled at.

His head really hurt. Blood rushing to it couldn’t be helping with the headache. He vaguely hoped that he might pass out before Nathaniel arrived, so that at least he wouldn’t be conscious for the ritual murder.

The cold room grew colder, but the sudden goosebumps running down Flynn’s arms were only partially due to that. Candles distributed through the room flicked to life and Flynn finally got to see where he was. The room was roughly what he had predicted: a ten foot by ten foot box of dark stone. Alice’s cobweb-covered bones lay on a table against one wall, and as he slowly spun to see the back of the room, he saw the other end of the rope descend from a pulley in the ceiling. It was attached to a wooden wheel set into the floor, so that spinning the wheel would raise or lower whatever was hanging from the rope.

What he didn’t see was a door. Even if he’d managed to get his hands free, there would still have been no way out. This made him feel better, because if there was no possible way for him to get out of this room, then he didn’t have to hang here stressing over what he should have or could have done. Death was inevitable, so he might as well close his eyes and savour whatever time he had left to reminisce. At the very least, he didn’t like the idea of thrashing and yelling like a captured animal when Nathaniel arrived.

Something metal scraped on stone behind him. Flynn jerked around to see the knife rise up. At first he thought it was floating on its own, but if he squinted, he could make out the shape of a man as faint as a shadow in twilight. The knife moved toward him. Flynn didn’t so much see the man walking toward him as see distortions around the edge of where the man would be.

“Get back.” Flynn impressed himself with how level his voice was considering how terrified he was.

Intangible fingers prickled his hair. The knife was so close to his face the blade blurred. Between the blood rushing in his ears and his frantically pounding heart, he was nearly deaf. Flynn squeezed his eyes closed and silently apologized to his mom for not visiting often enough, and his mind screamed when cold metal cut the side of his neck.

The cold of the knife quickly turned into the heat of blood, especially because the knife withdrew after making only an inch-long gash on the side of his neck. Then the fingers that weren’t quite there clenched around his hair and twisted his neck sideways, causing the torn edges of the cut to pull apart. A pained gasp escaped him and he felt blood dripping out of the cut. The hand let go and Flynn’s eyes drifted downward, only now seeing that he dangled over a circle drawn in chalk. He didn’t recognize the symbols drawn around and crossing through the circle, but suspected he’d find them in one of the various books of occultism lurking in the study.

His drops of blood hit the chalk and then seemed to be sucked into it. Then he heard a long, relieved exhale of breath. When the fingers returned to his head, they were no longer intangible.

A man stood beside him, not-quite-solid but far more than mist. Flynn’s eyes drifted past a button-up shirt and pale grey skin to see a face that appeared in photos throughout the buildings. Black eyes looked down at him as he wiped the bloodied tip of the knife on the shoulder of Flynn’s shirt.

Nathaniel ran his fingers through Flynn’s hair, sending a shiver up his spine. He twisted away from the touch, making the cut on his neck sting from the movement. Nathaniel turned away without a word and Flynn dared hope it was over. Maybe he’d built up all this fear over just a little cut on the neck, and Nathaniel didn’t actually intend to kill him. Blood trickled freely down his neck, over his jaw, and then along the edge of his ear toward his hairline. It tickled, but the pain was enough to distract him from it.

Nathaniel reached under the table that held Alice’s remains and pulled out a broad wooden basin, likely an old-fashioned bathtub. He dragged this back toward Flynn, setting it up directly under him. Flynn’s heart sank; the first cut hadn’t been the end of it after all. Nathaniel offered no explanation for his actions, but Flynn was able to piece some of it together. It seemed that the first cut had been for an unrelated ritual that brought Nathaniel closer to the world of the living, perhaps to make the necromancy easier, or just that this was how he wanted to appear when he finally contacted Alice. A few drops of blood were all he needed for that, but based on the size of the basin below Flynn, he needed much more to actually bring Alice back.

“It’s not going to work,” Flynn tried. “How many times have you attempted this? No matter what you do, Alice isn’t coming back, and she isn’t going to forgive you.”

The voice that responded rasped like a wind through dying leaves. “Alice….”

Flynn felt the cold from the ghost standing right by his cheek. Fingers grabbed his hair and held him taut.

“You understand… nothing,” Nathaniel hissed.

“I understand you murdered her.”

“It was an accident!” His roar thundered like a gust of wind. “She will forgive me.”

“I doubt - hrk.” Nathaniel jerked his head back, exposing his throat.

Nathaniel played the tip of his knife over Flynn’s neck, while Flynn tried not to swallow Any movement could put him that millimetre closer to cutting range. “She will forgive me. I need only speak with her again to explain, to make her understand. Your sacrifice will allow that.” His thumb stroked across Flynn’s cheek and Flynn fought to keep from squirming. “Thank you. Your blood will provide my penance.”

The blade pushed down. Flynn fought to control his breathing. His throbbing pulse made it feel like Nathaniel was about to cut directly into his heart.

The wall smashed open. Nathaniel twisted at the interruption and Flynn gasped as the blade sliced below his jaw.

“Hey! Casper!” Yuri stood in the doorway, his arm in a makeshift sling and panting from running.

Nathaniel rushed at him, knife extended, with a thunderous wail of, “Get out!”

Yuri threw up his hand and the knife flew out of Nathaniel’s grip. It clanked on the floor across the room and Yuri ran forward while Nathaniel was distracted. Flynn felt dizzy again, and this time it was from the whiplash of going from believing he was about to die to overcome with joy at the sight of Yuri.

“Sorry I’m late.” Yuri pulled his arm out of the sling and used it to wield a fragment of broken glass. He used his good arm to support Flynn’s shoulders and then winced as he reached up with the other to slice the rope.

“Your arm.” Yuri’s arm had been out of the sling for a couple of weeks now; what happened? Flynn would have continued his question, but talking made the cut on his neck hurt all over again.

“Don’t worry about it.” Yuri finished cutting through the rope and Flynn dropped. Yuri was only able to prevent his head from smashing into the ground, and Flynn was sure he would bruise from how hard his tailbone hit the stone. Yuri took his sling, which turned out to be a pillowcase, and pressed it against the gash on Flynn’s neck. The pressure made the pain spike again and Flynn groaned. “Hold that with your shoulder real quick.”

Yuri stood and faced Nathaniel. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that? You’ve been killing people for a hundred years just trying to say sorry? Did those people’s lives mean nothing to you?”

Nathaniel didn’t answer, which Flynn took as a ‘no.’ He had done as Yuri said and tried to use his shoulder to put pressure on the makeshift bandage. He already felt the pillowcase growing warm and wet from his blood.

“All these years and you never even asked a psychic to do a séance with you?”

“I am psychic,” Nathaniel hissed. He had retrieved his knife and now stood facing Yuri, each waiting for the other to move.

“Not the right kind, though, huh?”

Nathaniel’s silence answered. His mouth became a straight line, frustrated and ashamed. How many times had he tried to reach Alice the way Judith had before resorting to murder? How many lives would have been spared if he’d just been the right kind of psychic?

“You don’t need to kill Flynn,” Yuri said. “I can reach Alice now, you chat with her through me, and then we both go on our way without any more stabbing. Alright?”

Seconds trickled by. The seemed to last an eternity to Flynn, who felt his life ebbing away with every throb of his heart. He wondered if Yuri had another plan, because he wasn’t sure if Yuri could carry him out of here and fight off a ghost with a knife at the same time.

“Very well.” Nathaniel’s answer brought a swell of relief.

Yuri nodded slowly and backed up. “I need Flynn.” He knelt beside Flynn and used his glass to cut the rope on Flynn’s wrists. While he was at it, he twisted the bloody pillowcase so a fresh section covered the wounds. Yuri then wrapped it around the other side and pulled it as tight as he could without cutting off air. Flynn grunted and struggled to breathe anyway as the increased pressure worsened the already searing pain. His entire neck felt hot and wet and he was already growing light-headed.

“It’s alright,” Yuri whispered. “I’ll get us out of here.” He took Flynn’s hands in his, forming a small circle, and squeezed Flynn’s them reassuringly.

All Flynn could do was lie on the ground and let Yuri do his thing. He hoped Yuri was confident, because the last time, Judith had done the actual contacting.

“Alice,” Yuri said, copying Judith to the best of his ability. “Alice, please come down here now.”

Over Yuri’s shoulder, Nathaniel watched with a hungry look. His knife was still smeared with Flynn’s blood and if this didn’t work, Flynn had a bad feeling that Nathaniel was going to decide that two bodies’ worth of blood was better than one.

Then the candlelight flickered. Flynn glanced around with his eyes, not willing to move his neck. He couldn’t see anything, but then Yuri stiffened. He sucked in a gulp of air as his eyes rolled back into his head.

“Yuri?” Flynn croaked.

Yuri ignored him and twisted to face Nathaniel while still clinging to Flynn’s hands. “Nathaniel!”

Nathaniel’s face lit up with hope. “Alice?” After terrorizing Flynn, it was eerie to see him look so full of love and longing.

“What have you done, Nathaniel?” It was still Yuri’s voice, but carried with a different timbre that made it almost unrecognizable.

“Alice, my love.” Nathaniel moved closer, holding out his hands. “I’ve waited so long to speak to you again - to tell you of the deep regret and sorrow in my heart. That night was a mistake, one that I suffered over every night these past hundred -”

“You murdered me!” Alice-in-Yuri screeched. “Murderer! Betrayer!”

“Alice! I love you!”

“Don’t tell me you love me while my body rots in your basement.”

“No… no, this isn’t you.”

“Let me go, Nathaniel! Let my body rest and my soul be at peace. Leave all these poor people alone.”

“Alice wouldn’t say this. Alice would forgive me.”

“I will never forgive you.”

Nathaniel was shaking his head uncontrollably now. “No. No…. No!”

Yuri gasped again and slumped forward. He let go of Flynn’s hands and Flynn’s arms dropped. Yuri panted for breath, but Flynn was watching Nathaniel. What had been the clear shape of a man earlier now roiled like boiling water. Flynn absently wondered if it was his own fading consciousness.

The room shook. Bones rattled on the table, the rope overhead swung wildly, and dust rained form the ceiling. Yuri was still out of it, Flynn wasn’t strong enough to do any running, and giving Nathaniel the last conversation with Alice he’d desired had utterly failed to pacify his spirit. He really hoped Yuri came to his senses soon.


	16. Psychics

“Ghost hunters?” Yuri looked up from his cheeseburger.

Karol sat on the floor on the other side of the coffee table with his fast food meal spread out before him. Karol was nine years old, and had been dropped off at Yuri’s house while his parents were out for the night. “Yeah! Like the paranormal teams on TV.”

Flynn finished swallowing a bite of his chicken sandwich. “You want to wander around empty houses with night vision cameras?”

“Uh-huh!” Karol nodded eagerly. “Except they wouldn’t be empty. They’d be full of ghosts!”

Yuri and Flynn exchanged a look. It had been a normal evening, so far. Yuri was on babysitting duty, so Flynn had come over to hang out and keep him company. They’d already taken Karol out to see a movie, then picked up a late dinner to eat in the basement. Karol hadn’t mentioned anything about ghost hunting until now.

“Where did you get this idea?” Flynn asked politely. Flynn wasn’t officially Karol’s babysitter, but he’d tagged along often enough in their teen years that he was Karol’s parents’ next best option if Yuri was unavailable.

“I found a thing on Youtube.” Karol shoved fries into his mouth before continuing. “There are ghost hunters who post videos of the missions. It looks so cool! They have all this footage of doors slamming and voices coming from nowhere! And I’ve seen lots of videos of ghosts caught on camera. I bet we could get cool videos like that too.”

Yuri had never told Karol about his mom’s passion for the paranormal. Yuri tended not to bring it up in general, because people always got weird about it. Either they were earnest believers who went on to ask if Yuri had followed in her footsteps and found any evidence of her spirit still lurking, or they were cynics who got that funny look on their face that said the only thing keeping them from making a rude comment was respect for the dead. Karol might have picked things up from comments over the years because Yuri was willing to believe he’d remarked on ghost hunters in TV shows with an air of familiarity, and he and Flynn had never outright hid their conversations about paranormal debunkings, but he certainly hadn’t told Karol the full story.

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Flynn told Karol gently but firmly. “What you see on Youtube are digitally altered videos. People added things with special effects to make it look like a ghost and increase views.”

“No!” Karol glared back. “I know that some of them are fake, but not all of them. Besides, if we went out and did a ghost hunt, we would get real stuff and we’d know it was real. I really wanna try it. Just once?”

Sometimes Yuri resented Karol. He wondered how a boy of nine could have so much ambition and clear sight about what he wanted in his future, when nineteen-year-old Yuri was drowning in the knowledge that he wanted to drop out of university but had no plans to drop into. If he had no plans, though, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to hitch his wagon to Karol’s. He looked to Flynn. “You know, it might be fun to try out. Even if there are no ghosts, finding out what actually caused the haunting stuff could be interesting.”

Flynn rubbed his chin. “True…. Sodia is always telling me to get a hobby outside of school.”

“Really? Yes!” Karol punched the air. “We should get a whole team together! And we’ll have a website, and a Youtube account, and maybe a Patreon and we’ll get really big and-”

“Whoa, hold on.” Yuri held up a hand. “Let’s start with this team first. Who else do you want to bring besides the three of us?”

Flynn said, “I know a girl in one of my elective classes. She looks like she’s barely in high school, but she’s some kind of child prodigy and is taking university classes already. I heard her rant about a fake paranormal Youtube video a little while ago. Apparently she’s got some tech knowledge about this stuff? We could ask if she’s interested.”

“That sounds great,” Karol said. “And maybe we can post online, too, to see if anyone else is interested. This is gonna be so cool, you guys.”

Yuri and Flynn smiled encouragingly and nodded. The look they exchanged over Karol’s head said they had similar sentiments. This might be interesting if they got a chance to debunk hauntings in person. Besides, even if they accomplished nothing, it would still be a chance to hang with friends out in old buildings late at night, and Yuri was always up for a hobby that got him out of Alexei’s house. It would be fun, and perfectly safe. After all, Flynn was right: there was no such thing as ghosts.

* * *

“Let’s go, Flynn.” Yuri used the fragment of glass from the shattered dome to finally cut the rope on Flynn’s ankles. He had a few cuts on his fingers by now, but at least it had served him well.

The room still shook. Nathaniel was nowhere to be seen, but his presence filled the room. Yuri wished he could go back to being oblivious to ghostly moods because he’d be a lot less stressed if he didn’t sense overwhelming hatred and anger filling the house up. He didn’t have a plan for dealing with Nathaniel. He’d charged in here with the sole aim of rescuing Flynn, and now he only wanted to focus on getting Flynn out of the house.

“Wait,” Flynn mumbled, one hand flopping to Yuri’s knee. “Phone.”

“What?” For a split-second, Yuri thought Flynn was trying to say he had a phone call waiting for him, until he realized Flynn’s hand on his knee had turned to a pointing finger. He spotted Flynn’s phone against the wall and darted over to it.

After he picked it up, Flynn started to say, “My password is-”

“I know what your password is.” Yuri typed it in quickly and swiped to the home screen. He ignored Flynn’s confused look; Flynn had had the same password on every piece of technology he’d owned since grade ten, because digital security was, unfortunately, digital and thus forever beyond Flynn’s grasp. He didn’t have time to explain that to Flynn because he was already dialling emergency services.

“I need an ambulance at Zaphias Castle,” Yuri blurted before the dispatcher could finish talking.

“At the castle?” she questioned.

“Yes, at the castle. We’re inside and my friend’s bleeding out. Now I gotta go, sorry.” Yuri hung up and slipped the phone in his pocket. He suspected cops would arrive along with the ambulance to ask them about trespassing, but he honestly didn’t care at this point. He’d already assaulted the chief of police today; how much more trouble could he be in for trespassing?

Back to Flynn, he pulled Flynn’s arm over his shoulders and helped him up. Yuri’s own arm screamed from being used, but he pushed that aside and dragged Flynn to the exit. They went through the doorway to the same cobweb-encrusted hallway Yuri had found before. His guess had been right: the wall at the end of the corridor was not a wall at all, but a door with no knob and hinges on the inside. In the dark, with so much dust and cobwebs filling the crevices, the hairline cracks around the edges had been unnoticeable.

Yuri dragged Flynn along. Flynn stumbled and struggled to stay on his feet, but at least he was still conscious. They passed the open doorway to the room that had once been filled with corpses, but the only remnants now were scraps of forgotten police tape. He shoved Flynn into the elevator and let him slump to the ground with a hand pressed over his neck.

“Going up,” Yuri said and yanked the rope. The elevator lifted slightly, but his arm shook from the exertion. Yuri tried again, and again struggled to get them up. “Damn it, damn it….” He’d been able to operate it with one hand the last time he was here, but now he had twice the weight to lift. He tentatively tried to use his left arm to assist, but his elbow currently looked like a doughnut lurked beneath his skin and throbbed with every frantic beat of his heart. The dull throb turned to a sharp spike the moment he tried to pull their weight up.

The candlelight from down the hall flickered. Yuri shot his gaze back and tried to figure out what the movement he saw in the room was. Then he realized it was smoke from the candles, all drawn together to coalesce into a thickening, darkening sphere in the centre of the room. “Flynn, d’you see that?”

“Mmm?” Flynn groggily blinked his eyes open. “Whazzat…? Smoke?”

Yuri tore his eyes away from the smoke to inspect Flynn. It was hard to see clearly in the faint light, but his face was a type of pale Yuri would describe as ‘deathly’ if that word didn’t terrify him. Yuri squeezed his shoulder with a grimace. “Help is coming, Flynn. You’re gonna be fine.” Then he grabbed the rope again and put his mind into it as well as his shoulder. So far, he’d found it much easier to push things than to pull things, but if he was able to knock that bookshelf over, he had to be strong enough to equal a healthy man’s pulling strength. Nathaniel had regularly used the elevator to carry a second body; he could do this.

Except that the sphere of smoke had now grown larger than a boulder. Yuri glanced between it and the rope, until suddenly it no longer swirled harmlessly in the distance, but streaked down the hall toward them. As it moved, a gap in the front opened and shifted until it appeared like a grinning skull, mouth wide to swallow them whole. Shock froze Yuri’s reaction by only a second, but he feared that second would be long enough. His brain strained to concentrate on the rope and he felt the elevator rising, but not fast enough.

Yuri let out a whispered rush of, “Shit, shit, shit, shit-”

The smoke slammed into an invisible wall less than a metre from the elevator. Yuri stared in shock at smoke struggling to get to him, and then a human form took shape in front of him. The spectre of Alice, her arms held wide to hold off Nathaniel’s assault, held onto visibility long enough to lock eyes with Yuri and give him a single nod. She didn’t speak, but her expression said enough: put an end to this for me.

She faded and Yuri worried she wouldn’t be able to hold him off for much longer. He put all his focus into the rope and yanked. The elevator lifted and Yuri panted from the exertion. Moving things with your mind was more physically draining than it sounded.

He pulled them up with so much exertion that the elevator rattled when it crashed into the ceiling. He pushed open the door and shook Flynn awake. Flynn managed to meet his eyes, but needed help standing up again. Even more of his weight than before came down on Yuri, and Yuri felt more like he was dragging Flynn out than helping him walk. The tight knots meant to apply more pressure to Flynn’s wound were soaked with blood.

“Almost there. You can make it.” Yuri pulled him down the stairs and into the study. A distant rumble filled the house and paintings fell from the walls as they passed. The front door was just ahead. Flynn’s ragged breathing, so close to Yuri’s ear, urged him to go faster. In the front entryway, a light bulb shattered overhead and bits of glass landed in Yuri’s hair.

They crashed into the front door. Yuri grabbed the doorknob and -

“Damn it!” Yuri twisted and pried, but he couldn’t even get the knob to turn. He tugged and shook, and then pressed his hand against the lock and tried to force it open. The door wasn’t locked, though. He might be able to smash open a door, but he couldn’t overpower a door held shut with the power of a psychic who’d had a hundred years to hone his skills.

They backed away, back to the entry hall. Yuri lowered Flynn to the floor and let him slump against the wall. His heart raced almost as fast as his brain did as it searched for possibilities. The front door was shut, but he at least needed to try the other doors before freaking out. He ran his hand through Flynn’s hair and smiled grimly. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He couldn’t drag Flynn all over the house searching for a way out. It would be too slow, along with wearing Flynn out.

Yuri ran to the library. The chandeliers shuddered from the house’s rumbling and Yuri made a point not to run beneath them. He hit the back door and tugged, but couldn’t even make it rattle in its frame. “Come on!” Yuri grabbed a thick book and took it to the window. With all the strength in his arm, he smashed it at the glass. The book thunked against the window. Yuri wasn’t sure if Nathaniel had done something to the windows or if he just didn’t have the strength to smash it. A chair would have been better, but with his busted arm, picking one up and swinging it with enough force would be impossible.

He turned around, looking for options, and spotted Rita’s rug. They had hoped to trick Nathaniel into it, and he wasn’t sure how to go about that right now, but it might be their only chance. Yuri grabbed it and dragged it back to the entry hall. He found the side with the opening, positioned it facing forward, and stood on the other end of it. He would get Nathaniel to charge at him, straight into the ring, and then dive around it and finish the circle before Nathaniel got out. He would need to move fast, but it was the only thing he could think of at the moment. Across the hall, Flynn sat slumped against the wall. Occasional movements from his choked gasps for breath reassured Yuri that he was still alive, at least for now.

“Hey!” Yuri pounded the wall a few times. “I’m over here, Nathaniel! You wanna kill me?! Come do it yourself this time, you lazy coward!” Yuri’s eyes darted around the room and he checked over his shoulder as well. He couldn’t forget the feeling of a cord wrapping around his neck from behind, and felt horribly exposed with no one watching his back.

Instead of a breath behind his ear, he heard a woman scream from the top of the stairs. Alice’s ghost tumbled down them with a series of thuds. Yuri had heard this exact sequence before, though he wished he could forget. Alice’s body hit the floor with a final thud before fading away, but the man at the top of the stairs remained visible.

“It was an accident.” Nathaniel was only speaking, but his voice boomed from every corner of the house like a loudspeaker. “I loved her. She loved me. She would understand.”

“If that’s how you treat the people you love, I’d hate to be your enemy.”

Nathaniel fixed his gaze on Yuri and then streaked down the stairs faster than physical legs could carry him. Ah, Yuri remembered. I am.

Yuri braced himself to make his move, but Nathaniel pulled up short and instead a wave of energy blasted ahead. Like getting him by a truck, Yuri was thrown off his feet and flew back into the library. His head made a loud crack when it landed on the ground, and then everything went dark.

Yuri drifted in darkness. Pain and fear stirred around him and he knew he needed to get up and help Flynn, but he felt like he was downing in a mire.

“Yuri….” A soft female voice called to him in the darkness. “Yuri, sweetheart.” A hand stroked his cheek.

Yuri opened his eyes. He stood in a black plane, looking down at a short woman with long black hair. For a second, Yuri didn’t understand because he was supposed to look up at Mom, and the realization that it had been so many years since he’d seen her that he’d grown a foot taller hit him more than he’d thought it would.

“Oh, Yuri.” Her hand ran down his cheek and then both of them rested on his shoulders.

“Mom….” Yuri’s breath caught in his throat. There were so many things he wanted to say to her that they jumbled up in a traffic jam. The only thing that managed to squeeze through was a little, “I’m sorry.”

She tilted her head and smiled sadly. “You have nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart. I’m the one who’s sorry. I never should have come to the castle alone. I knew the risk and I thought it was worth it, but it wasn’t fair to you. I was selfish, and it’s my fault I wasn’t there for you.”

“You left me with Alexei.” Yuri tried not to sound accusative, but he couldn’t help it.

Her face filled with grief. “Alexei… is no longer the man I married. Then again, maybe he is. Maybe I was just too blind to see it. Too infatuated with the mask he wore to think too deeply on the traits that slipped through the cracks.”

Yuri took a tight breath and pulled a hand up to rest on hers. “Mom, I have to know. Did he ever hurt you?”

Mom sighed deeply. “No. He never harmed me, or threatened me, or frightened me.”

Yuri closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “Right. So it was just me, then, that brought it out.”

Mom’s hands tightened to grip his shoulders. “No, Yuri. It wasn’t you at all. You didn’t make him that way - he was never the compassionate man I thought he was. Grief damages you, it distorts you, it weighs on you - I know that you know this. But it can’t change your nature. A man who treats other humans like tools to be wielded already saw the world that way when they were whole; loss simply kills their motivation to hide it.”

Her words filled him with emotions that he wasn’t comfortable processing, let alone expressing. Instead, he looked away and mumbled, “Makes sense.”

“Whatever happens, and whatever you do, you’re enough. You’re enough for me, and for the world, and for anyone who matters. You’re my son and I am so proud of whatever you choose to do with your life.” She pulled him into a tight embrace.

Without even thinking about it, Yuri hugged her back. She felt so small when he remembered hugs from her enclosing him. It wasn’t fair that he hadn’t had a chance to feel the hugs slowly morphing over the years, and it definitely wasn’t fair that he’d spent half his life with Alexei rather than her. Now, it wasn’t fair that when she pulled away, her face was a little more translucent and Yuri realized this meeting was going to have to end soon.

“You have to go, Yuri,” she said. “I know you can overcome Nathaniel. He’s nothing but another selfish man who thinks had has a right to other people’s lives. Give him hell for me.”

Yuri forced a smile and nodded firmly. “You got it.”

He blinked and he was staring at the ceiling of the library. Yuri groaned and sat up with a wave of dizziness. A splitting headache made it difficult to concentrate but through the doorway he saw Flynn collapsed on the ground. Nathaniel approached Flynn, knife once more in hand.

“No,” Yuri seethed and tried to get up, but as soon as he lifted his head, the dizziness tried to bring him down again. There was no way he’d be able to run to Flynn’s side, but Flynn lay helplessly as Nathaniel reached him. Yuri had to do something, he had to….

Rita’s rug had flipped onto its back in the doorway of the library. Yuri considered trying to lure Nathaniel over here again, but with the circle showing up, Nathaniel would never fall for it. Yuri had broken out of Alexei’s house and come all the way here to save Flynn, but he was right back where he started: lying there uselessly as death came for Flynn, unable to reach him in time to make a difference.

Horrible rage at Nathaniel burned ferociously enough to make him shake. Nathaniel thought of himself as some grand magical lord, uniquely talented and justified in using lesser-humans for his ends. He wasn’t, though. He was just another power-hungry, abusive asshole who didn’t seem to understand that other people were just as human as he was. He claimed to have done everything through his deep love for Alice, but hadn’t Alexei claimed to love Yuri for years? Yuri knew what it looked like when a person claimed to love you while actually just loving your role as a prop in their life.

Flynn tried to push himself up on his arm, perhaps to try to crawl away. He was still awake! And not dead yet! But Nathaniel had knelt and begun using his knife to scrap a circle into the wooden floor, clearly intending to finish his ritual right now, with whatever amount of blood Flynn had left to give.

Yuri wanted to smash far more than a bookshelf down on Nathaniel’s head, but since physical attacks wouldn’t harm a ghost, he settled for raising his arm, smashing his hand forward, and sending Rita’s rug blasting across the room. It slid around Nathaniel like a horseshoe ringing around a post. Nathaniel looked down and exclaimed, then turned back to snarl at Yuri.

The rug would have been useless. It had the opening that allowed it to slip around Nathaniel in the first place, and he could just as easily step out again. He would have, except while he was distracted with looking back at what had happened, Flynn reached a hand to his neck, smeared his finger with blood, and used that as ink to finish the circle off.

Nathaniel howled, but the rumbling in the house cut off. He threw himself against the invisible wall, and then backward as if it would be weaker on that side. He thrashed like a fly in a jar, no longer able to influenced anything outside the circle.

Yuri let out a long breath and then managed to get to his knees. Moving made his head throb and crawling with only one arm proved difficult even without the dizziness, but he managed to drag himself to Flynn’s side. Once there, he took a look at the rug to see that Flynn had used his blood to write the letter shin a few times to fill the gap.

Yuri grabbed the edge of the rug and pushed it into the corner, out of the way of where anyone might walk. Nathaniel had vanished, but whether he had faded back to the less powerful form he’d had before tonight, or just faded to invisibility to sulk, Yuri neither knew nor cared. They could deal with the rug later.

“Flynn.” Yuri grabbed Flynn’s arm. “You still with me, Flynn?”

Flynn grunted but didn’t open his eyes.

He positioned himself against the wall by Flynn’s head and leaned back, willing his own head to stop spinning. His injured arm rested on Flynn’s shoulder, his thumb moving in small, reassuring circles. As he was wondering if the conversation with his mom had all been in his head or not, he saw her. She stood on the other side of the entry hall with a portrait of Nathaniel’s father visible through her translucent form. The smile she gave him was broad, full of love, and brimming over with pride. She nodded to him, and slowly faded away.

In the distance, an ambulance wailed.


	17. Hospital

The ambulance arrived before the police. They had a lot of questions about just how Flynn had gotten his throat cut, but Yuri blamed his head injury for his vague answers and inability to elaborate. Someone was going to need to be blamed for assaulting Flynn, and Yuri wasn’t sure how to explain that a ghost had done it.

Luckily, they were more concerned with getting Flynn to a hospital so they only pestered Yuri for as long as it took to load Flynn onto a stretcher. Yuri was directed to take a seat in the corner of the ambulance, and told he’d get his head looked at when they arrived but Flynn was the priority now. Yuri was more than happy to sit back and let them focus their attention on Flynn, because they may have gotten out of the castle, but they weren’t yet out of the woods. The whole way to the hospital, Yuri stared at Flynn’s face and begged for his eyes to open. In the bright light of the ambulance, he could finally see just how grey Flynn had turned. Yuri hated the blood smeared on his hands and knees because the more of it on him, the less of it still in Flynn’s body.

When they arrived at the hospital, Flynn still had a pulse. It was faint, but Yuri clung to that knowledge.

“Go check in over there,” an EMT told him and pointed to the desk. “Get your head checked out.”

“Right, ok. Is Flynn-” but when Yuri turned around again, Flynn had already been rolled off to be seen by a doctor. That was good, Yuri told himself, but couldn’t stop panicking that the last time he’d seen Flynn, he’d been alive, but he wasn’t guaranteed to be the next time Yuri saw him. He wanted to have had one last look at him - one last chance to hold his hand and tell him he loved him, even if Flynn wasn’t conscious to hear it. Flynn slipping away as soon as Yuri’s back was turned felt like a horrible omen of what might happen later tonight.

Yuri was so distracted by his worries about Flynn that he nearly convinced the doctor his concussion was worse than it was based on his ability to coherently answer questions. A CT scan thankfully cleared things up and he was deemed not to be in imminent danger of slipping into a coma and dying. After downing some pills to tackle the headache, he was sent along for yet more scans to deal with his arm.

At close to two o’clock in the morning, Yuri sat on an exam table and waited for a doctor. All his thoughts were on Flynn and now he felt stupid for yelling at Flynn over his poorly-timed confession last December. Based on the story he’d heard later, his friends had spent the night after his fall anxiously sitting in the waiting room and praying for good news. The news they’d gotten - that Yuri had suffered a serious spinal cord injury and recovery was still uncertain - wasn’t even good news in the broad scheme of things. It had only felt like good news in the context of them dreading being told he was dead, and Yuri acutely understood how they felt. If someone told him that Flynn had been so badly hurt that he would never fully recover and life would never be the same, Yuri would be overjoyed because a disabled Flynn was still an alive Flynn. This was exactly how Flynn had felt, and Yuri couldn’t blame him at all for blurting out his feelings the moment he had the chance.

The door opened. “Yuri?” the doctor said.

In lieu of hello, Yuri said, “Is my friend alright? The one who came in with me?”

The doctor paused and then she gave him a sympathetic look. “Sorry, I don’t know.”

Yuri sighed. “Alright.”

“Now, I’ve looked at your x-rays and there is a fracture in your arm. You broke it last December according to your chart, correct?”

Yuri nodded. It was hard to respond intelligently because the pills that had done an excellent job of numbing his pain had also done an excellent job of filling his head with cotton candy. It took conscious effort to keep from drifting into a stoned haze, and then half of the clear thoughts he was able to formulate were about Flynn.

“Right. Luckily, the plate in your arm is still in place so we don’t need to surgically fix it, but it will need to be casted again for probably four to six more weeks.”

Yuri just sighed in resignation. Maybe he should learn how to hold a pencil and write with his right hand, because it was starting to feel like his left would just be permanently out of commission.

The doctor hesitated again and then, clearly picking her words carefully, said, “It looks like the fracture was cause by twisting motion. How exactly did that happen?”

She knew it hadn’t been an accident; Yuri could see it on her face. He supposed there were some creative accidents that could cause a similar injury, but she probably saw victims of domestic violence come through this emergency room ten times more often than people suffering freak snowboarding accidents in downtown Zaphias.

Maybe it was because he was so exhausted, maybe because the medication dulled his thinking, or maybe it was just because he had reached his limit with Alexei and didn’t care anymore, but he told her, “My stepfather did it.”

The doctor struggled with a mix of sympathy and happy relief, because she was probably used to people with obvious abuse injuries making excuses. “I see. Would you like to file a police report? We can help you set that in motion.”

“You know what? Yeah. Yeah, I would like that.”

She smiled. “Ok. We’ll get some pictures taken and in the morning you can talk to the police. Actually, there was already a police officer here who wanted to talk to you, but we told him to come back in the morning.”

“Yeah, figured they’d be interested.”

“Let’s get started with the pictures, and then we can put that arm in a cast and get you to bed.”

* * *

Yuri’s sleep was haunted by dreams of Flynn’s death, and when he woke up every couple of hours, he had to keep reminding himself that Flynn was still alive, at least as far as he knew.

The next morning, a nurse brought him a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with a side helping of more painkillers. “How do you feel this morning?” she asked.

“I’ve been better.” Yuri adjusted the bed to sit upright. After last winter, he was well experienced with hospital routines. He downed the pills with some orange juice and added, “But, I’ve been worse, too. How’s Flynn? My friend who came in last night?”

“Ah… I’m sorry, but I’m unable to release any information at this time.”

Yuri grimaced. “Got it.” That meant Flynn hadn’t returned to consciousness yet. If he had, he would have asked them to tell Yuri he was fine. Yuri wanted to believe that it meant he was still alive, though. Surely they were at least allowed to say if a patient had passed away? Yuri didn’t know, but he chose to believe so.

“Also, there’s a police officer here to talk to you. Do you feel up to seeing him?”

“Sure, send him in.”

Yuri was halfway through his eggs when Leblanc entered his room. For a moment, Leblanc stood in the doorway and just looked at him.

Yuri broke the silence by asking, “Is this about my arm or Flynn’s neck?”

Leblanc shut the door and pulled a chair over to sit next to Yuri’s bed. “Both. I want to know what’s going on.”

Yuri took a bit of toast. “A lot is going on. What do you already know?”

“I know that last night you got into a physical altercation with Chief Dinoia. After seeing a doctor for his injuries, he called me to ask that I go to Zaphias Castle, because you had stormed out of the house without even a jacket. He believed you intended to go to the castle again and was worried about you. I arrived just in time to see paramedics getting ready to drive off. They told me a young man had a knife wound and another had a head injury and that I could ask more questions at the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital, I was told pretty much the same information and that I wouldn’t be able to question the victims until this morning at least. This morning, I fully intended to come here to ask you about what happened to Flynn, but first a colleague who knew I was on my way to the hospital forwarded to me a report of domestic violence to look into, and you can imagine my surprise to see your name on it. So, I’d really like to hear what happened from you.”

Yuri wasn’t surprised to hear that Alexei had framed his storming out as an ‘altercation,’ though he was mad. At least he’d had time while eating breakfast to decide how he was going to explain Nathaniel. But, he’d start with Alexei.

“It wasn’t much of a ‘physical altercation.’ Alexei got pissed at me for snooping in his drawers, slammed me against the wall and twisted my arm until it cracked.” He saw Leblanc’s disbelieving face and internally cringed. That was exactly the face he had expected to see every time in the past he considered going to police. Everyone loved Alexei; how was he supposed to convince them that their beloved boss was a monster? Yuri gently rapped on the plaster cast. “You can ask the doc about the x-rays for this. I’m afraid it’s the only real tangible thing I have. You can search the house for the lock on the door of the room he tried to jail me in, or the print-outs that prove he was stalking my phone, but I bet that’s somehow legal through a technicality. Honestly, this broken arm was a long time coming.”

Leblanc looked like Yuri had just accused Smokey the Bear of arson. “You - you’re accusing Chief Dinoia of child abuse?”

Yuri scowled. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m a child now, but when I was a teenager living in his house, yeah.”

“Chief Dinoia has always been the model of a respected officer.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing about models, isn’t it? They’re fake.”

“He wouldn’t do such a thing. Chief Dinoia is a virtuous man. He is the pride of the Zaphias PD.”

Yuri sighed and wearily shook his head. “Look, I don’t care if you believe me or not. I’m just tired of keeping this to myself while the rest of the public kisses his ass. He’s a piece of shit who hit me, starved me, stalked me, and generally made my life hell for the last ten years.”

Leblanc seriously looked like he was about to cry. “I see no reason why you would lie about your stepfather like this, but these allegations are so difficult to believe. If what you say is true, we are all fools for not seeing the truth.”

“Well, it’s true. Believe me or not. Honestly, I don’t expect anything to come of this. A man like him is buddies with all the prosecutors in the city, and that’s if it even gets to court. I just want to file the report so that at least when people Google his name, the top of the results will be articles about all the rumours of him being an abusive piece of shit. He’ll hate that.”

“I… think this will take some time to sink in. But, I must ask: did you assault him last night?”

Yuri pictured the bookshelf falling. Technically, he had. How was anyone going to prove it, though? Claiming he’d attacked Alexei with his psychic powers wouldn’t do much for his credibility. “Nah. He locked me in the basement and threatened to ship me off somewhere. I busted out and he came after me. The bookshelf happened to fall on him. Call it an act of God, but I was standing in the doorway when it happened and do you think I could have dragged it down with one functional arm?”

“Hm… I see.” Leblanc wrote something in his notepad and then continued. “Now, what happened at the castle?”

After serious deliberation, Yuri had decided that the best course of action was to say nothing at all. Any details he gave could either get him branded insane, or else deliberately lying to prank the police. So he put on a sad face and shook his head, slowly. “Sorry, things start getting fuzzy there. I hit my head pretty hard. All I know is some guy had been lurking in the castle, and he nabbed Flynn that afternoon. I went there to rescue him.”

“You didn’t think to call the police?” Leblanc raised an eyebrow.

Yuri shrugged. “I didn’t have a phone. Like I said, I was trying to escape from Alexei at the time. He had my phone.”

“Do you know who this person was? Can you describe him?”

Yuri scrunched up his face and pretended to try to remember. “He… no, sorry. A middle-aged guy, maybe? Everything around hitting my head is a big blur.” Yuri knew that claiming amnesia for the events at the castle threw significant doubt on his testimony against Alexei, but he didn’t expect Alexei to get prosecuted for that anyway.

“We checked the security footage from last night. Around midnight, some sort of… pulse? Something happened to cause all the cameras throughout the castle to short out. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

Yuri pictured Nathaniel’s tirade with the house rattling from the energy. “Nope.”

“Thought not. Anything else you can tell me?”

“I don’t think so. Sorry my memory is all screwed up.”

“Not your fault.” Leblanc snapped his notebook closed. “I’ll be back in a couple of days to interview Flynn if you remember anything.”

Yuri perked up. “Flynn? He’s alive?”

“Ah, well….” Leblanc straightened up. “I’m afraid I can’t give you details. Patient confidentiality and all that.”

Yuri was close to shouting. “Just tell me if he’s alive.”

Leblanc took in Yuri’s desperate face and then a slight smile twinkled in his eye. “He’s alive. And I think he’s close to being stable - but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Yuri leaned back in his pillows. “Didn’t hear a thing you said there. Must be the brain injury.”

Leblanc smiled, nodded, and said, “Contact me if you remember any details. And about Chief Dinoia… if you’re certain you want to move forward with that report, I’ll do what I can.”

Left alone and with the reassurance that Flynn was going to be alright, Yuri let himself fall into the kind of deep sleep that had evaded him last night.

* * *

The next time Yuri had visitors, they were much more welcome than a cop. Judith, Karol, Rita, Raven, and Estelle spilled into his room a little after lunch full of smiles and exclamations.

“Yuri!” Karol wailed and ran to his side. “Are you ok!? I heard you and Flynn were at the castle and I can’t believe you didn’t call us!”

“Slow down, boss, I’m fine.” Yuri laughed and rustled Karol’s hair. “Sorry I didn’t call you guys. I didn’t have my phone.”

“What happened, anyway?” Rita stood with her arms crossed near his bed, close enough to see that he was ok but far enough away to pretend she didn’t care about the answer. “Estelle’s boss told her there was an incident at the castle and we were there this morning, but I still don’t know how you and Flynn got involved.”

“It’s a bit of a long story.”

His friends got an even longer story than Leblanc did, because he skipped the amnesia excuse and told them everything about Nathaniel’s hidden room, Alice’s rejection, and their narrow escape. He got a bit fuzzy on the details directly prior to smashing his head, because the idea of telling Leblanc he’d gotten his memory jogged from hitting his head had been based on a partial truth, and he skipped right over the conversation with his mom.

He ended by saying, “We can figure out what to do about Nathaniel in his little rug prison later.”

“We already solved that, actually,” Judith said. She replied to his surprised look. “We went to the castle with Estelle this morning. It was obvious Nathaniel was captured there, so we took the rug and drove it outside of town.”

Yuri just stared at them. “Where did you take it?”

“Out into the woods,” Raven said. “Why d’ya think it took us so long ta get back here and say hi? ‘Course I don’t think Nat enjoyed his little car ride.”

Judith smiled. “A bit like a cat in a carrier getting taken to the vet. But we got a big plastic tub, filled it with quick-drying cement, and encased the rug in it.”

“Whoa. You guys were busy.”

Karol grinned. “By that point, Nathaniel wasn’t visible as a spectre like you said he was last night, but we certainly heard a lot of yelling.”

“Where did you put the tub?” Yuri asked.

“We buried it,” Rita answered. “And we put it in sideways, so even if he could move up and down within the circle, he’s still underground. He should be trapped there for years. Decades even. However long that concrete prevents the writing on the rug from eroding.”

Judith folded her arms and gazed toward the window. “He should be able to choose to move on from there. If not, he’ll be trapped in there for centuries…. I almost feel bad for him.”

Yuri thought about this and then said, “I don’t. He killed my mom.”

Judith looked back at him and then nodded in understanding.

“Yuri,” Karol said, “have you heard from Flynn yet? We asked at the desk and they said they couldn’t even confirm that he’s here.”

Yuri nodded slowly. “I haven’t been able to talk to him. He hasn’t woken up yet, but I heard he’s recovering.” Karol still looked scared, so Yuri said, “He’s going to be fine. He just needs to sleep a lot to regain his strength.”

“Speaking of rest,” Raven said, “how long are ya stuck here for, Yuri? Not another month-long sentence I hope?”

“Nah, just ’til the end of today. I’ll be going… home… after dinner.” Yuri didn’t exactly have a plan for where home was, come to think of it. The best offer was Flynn’s suggestion of moving in with his mom, but Flynn was still unconscious and Yuri didn’t like the idea of showing up on her doorstep unannounced. “Uh. Can anyone let me crash on your couch tonight?”

Raven, Judith, Karol, and Rita all offered at once, while Estelle apologized that her parents probably wouldn’t be happy about it. After some sorting, it was decided he would go home with Karol, whose parents already knew and liked him. By the time they were done discussing that, Yuri’s headache had spiked from all the commotion and he regretfully had to ask his friends to leave so he could take another nap.

* * *

Later that afternoon, a nurse arrived to deliver another round of painkillers and bring him the best news he’d heard all day. “Your friend Flynn has woken up. We told him you’d been asking after him and he said he’d like to see you. Do you feel up to walking over there?”

Yuri was already getting out of bed. “Absolutely.”

He followed the nurse down a series of hallways. He wished she’d walk faster, even though with his lingering dizziness and pounding skull, he wasn’t up to walking any faster. When she finally left him at Flynn’s door, Yuri didn’t hesitate to push it open.

Flynn appeared to be asleep again. There was slightly more pink in his cheeks than last night, which was a relief to see. His neck was covered in gauze and IV ran into his arm, but he looked ok. Yuri sat on the edge of Flynn’s bed and just looked at him. As desperate as he was to talk to him, it felt cruel to wake him up.

Yuri’s concern turned out to be groundless. With his eyes still closed, Flynn mumbled, “I’m awake.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Flynn opened his eyes and faintly smiled. “I am.” His smile slipped. “You look awful.”

“Says the guy with an IV.”

“Your arm. It’s broken again?”

Yuri rubbed the exterior of the sling. “Just a small fracture this time. It’s nothing compared to last time. I feel a bit like shit ‘cause I have a concussion, but I’ll be leaving the hospital in a few hours while you’re still here, so I think I won.”

Flynn smiled. It was weak, but to Yuri it was radiant. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m ok, too.”

“You almost died,” Yuri pointed out.

“But I didn’t. Thank you for saving me.”

“’Course I did. I love you.”

Flynn froze. Yuri did, too. He hadn’t exactly meant to say that. The words had been pressing against his mind all night and just slipped out. He felt like an idiot for saying them aloud and yet couldn’t exactly say he regretted doing so.

Flynn managed to speak first. “Um. You…?”

Yuri considered backpedaling, but there was no believable way to deny it now. The words were out there, and the fact that Flynn wasn’t looking at him with horror was a positive sign.

Still, Yuri had to turn to look at the wall in order to continue. “So maybe I was an idiot last December when I yelled at you. Maybe I’m bad at emotional shit. But you’re the one who initially confessed to me knowing I’m an idiot, so you’re at least partially to blame. I know you’ve already moved on, so it’s fine. I just… wanted to tell you.”

Flynn snickered, though it probably would have been a full laugh if he had the energy. “Yuri, you…. Why do you have to make things so complicated?”

“I don’t.”

“You could have just said….” Flynn grabbed Yuri’s hand and squeezed it as tightly as he could, which wasn’t much. “Can I have a do-over of the day I tried to confess to you?”

“Uh….?”

“Let’s back up and pretend I’m saying this for the first time, ok? I’m in love with you, Yuri, and I have been for some time now.”

The first time Yuri had heard those words, they shocked him to his core and filled him with confusion and fear. This time, they still shocked him to his core, but now it made his heart buzz and warmth flooded his body. “Still?”

Flynn managed to get his smile wider. “I did try to get over it, but there was a lot to get over.”

“Well… I guess that worked out well for me, huh?” Yuri pulled his hand away from Flynn’s so he could lean forward and push Flynn’s bangs back. “Sorry I was an idiot and kicked you out last time. I got scared and overreacted.”

“Sorry I sprung a confession on you at the worst possible time. I panicked and just blurted it out.”

“Funny, that sounds like something I would do.” He held the side of Flynn’s face and leaned closer until their lips touched.

For a place Yuri had never set foot in until last month, Zaphias castle had defined Yuri’s life. The sprawling mansion sat twice on his life’s timeline, each time a searing period to end one era and begin another. The first time, it took his mother away and ended a happy childhood. The second time, it had done its best to take Flynn away, but it failed. Instead, it had brought him to this moment, pressing his face close to Flynn’s. Every beat of Flynn’s heart reminded Yuri that Flynn was still with him. He’d spent the last ten years wanting to run away from Alexei, and he finally knew where he wanted to run to.

Yuri broke the kiss and jolted up when he heard Mrs. Scifo’s voice in the hallway. He scooted away just in time for the door to open. Mrs. Scifo burst into the room and ran to them with a cry of, “Oh, Flynn!”

Flynn had never looked so happy to hear his name. Yuri rose from the bed and back away to give them space.

“Hi, Mom,” Flynn said through a smothering hug. “I’m sorry for worrying you.”

Yuri met Flynn’s eyes over Mrs. Scifo’s shoulder. Yuri jerked his thumb at the door to indicate he’d leave them to it. Flynn gave a quick, apologetic nod and then Yuri slipped out of the room.

Yuri was in a good mood on his way back to his room. The concussion was only part of the reason he felt light-headed. A few hours ago, he’d been preparing himself for the worst, and now everything was coming together better than he had ever thought possible. He should have known that this mood was too good to last, because when he entered a common area to head back to his room, he came face to face with Alexei.

“Yuri.” Alexei had a bandage taped to the side of the face, but otherwise looked fine from the bookshelf incident. Hopefully had had plenty of bruising hidden under his clothes.

Yuri took a step back before he could stop himself. “The hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

For a moment, horrible paranoia made Yuri wonder how the hell Alexei still knew where to find him. He didn’t have his phone; had Alexei implanted a tracker in his clothes somehow? Would he truly never be able to escape Alexei’s reach? Then, he figured that since he was a player in the incident at the castle last night, information about where Leblanc had gone to interview him must be in police records somewhere. Alexei would have been able to access that. He also probably knew about Yuri’s injuries, since Leblanc would have written about his concussion and confused memories in his report. “Stop looking.”

“Are you well?”

“I’d be a lot better if you hadn’t broken my arm.”

Alexei took a few steps closer and this time Yuri stood his ground. “Look at you. I knew you would get injured if you went to Zaphias Castle. Now do you see why I was so intent on keeping you away from there? I did everything I could to protect you, and you got hurt the minute you defied me.”

“It’s pretty rich to preach about protecting me from getting hurt while I’m standing right here with my arm in a sling thanks to you.”

“You forced my hand. If you were better behaved, your arm wouldn’t have gotten hurt. Now, what time are you being discharged?”

Yuri almost admired Alexei’s artful use of the passive voice. “I don’t think it’s any business of yours when I’m getting discharged.”

Alexei looked irritated. “It is, because if it won’t be for several more hours, I will go home and return later to pick you up.”

Yuri shook his head. He almost couldn’t believe that Alexei still thought Yuri was going home with him. Almost, because he knew Alexei. “Yeah, no. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“You have nowhere else to go. You live with me.”

“Used to live with you. I have other arrangements now, and if I’m lucky, they won’t lock me in the basement or break my arm.”

Alexei rolled his eyes. “Must you always have that attitude? You should be grateful that I’m still willing to take you into my home after the stunt you pulled last night.”

“Shut up, Alexei.” Damn, that felt good to say. “I’m not going back. If I ever see you again, it’ll be in court. Now get the hell out of my life.”

Yuri walked around him to leave the room. He assumed Alexei had turned and was making a truly enjoyable expression, but Yuri didn’t look back.


	18. Epilogue

Birds chirped, a warm, late spring breeze rustled the trees, and Yuri placed a small stone on his mother’s grave. Then he stepped back and stood in thought. Beside him, Flynn held his hand.

Two weeks ago, Yuri had gone back to Zaphias Castle. He’d intended to join a tour and lurk in the back, but the ticket seller on duty recognized him from the news coverage and offered him a private tour. The guy running the tour was clearly dying to ask exactly what happened the night of the incident, but when he finally broken down and asked, Yuri pulled out his standard excuse of head trauma and amnesia.

The tour had included all the standard rooms that Yuri knew so well by now. In the entry hall, Yuri had checked to see if they’d gotten the blood stains out of the floor where Flynn had lain, and saw that a new runner had been placed along the floor beneath a sideboard. It neatly covered both any trace of blood and the haphazard circle Nathaniel had tried to carve before Yuri collared him. The conservatory was notably not part of the tour, and his guide had no idea when it would be re-opened. Debates still raged among local historians over what should be done to rebuild the glass dome. There was a big argument about what style of stained glass to use and something and another thing and Yuri had stopped listening.

What Yuri had really hoped to see, of course, was any sign of his mother. He looked for her in reflections and listened for her in quiet moments. When he was finally free to go up to wander the third floor museum alone, he sat down in a vacant corner, closed his eyes, and tried to reach her. She didn’t appear, and Yuri decided that this was a good thing. If Mom wasn’t around, hopefully that meant she had been able to move on to find peace.

“I saw her, you know,” Yuri told Flynn after a long pause. He’d never told anyone that part of what had happened that night, but it seemed right that Flynn knew.

“Hm? When?”

“That night. When I got knocked out, I met her. I saw her again just after you passed out.”

“Did it help?”

“I think so. It was good to have one last chance to talk to her.”

Flynn squeezed his hand. “I’m sure.”

“She said Alexei was never abusive to her, but that she feels guilty for not seeing who he really was - that she never really understood him.” Yuri looked at the vase of wilting flowers sitting at the base of the headstone with disgust. “And it looks like Alexei never truly understood her, either.” On top of her gravestone sat a small pile of stones. Some had been left by Yuri on previous occasions, and others from old friends. Other graves in this area, the ones also engraved with a Star of David or prayers in Hebrew, also held stones. It was just what they did, and Alexei never seemed to have gotten that. Worse, he never seemed to care. Yuri believed that Alexei had truly loved his mother, but he also believed that the woman Alexei had loved had been a version of her crafted in his mind to fit his image of a perfect family. Mom had been lucky, he thought, that her real personality had been close enough to what Alexei expected of her that he never tried to force her to comply the way he had with Yuri.

“Are you ready to go?” Flynn asked.

“Yeah. Karol wanted to meet around two, so we should head home.” He nodded to the grave. “See you around, Mom.” Flynn rubbed Yuri’s shoulder and then they turned to walk back down the path.

“Have they sealed off the tunnel yet?” Flynn asked.

For once, Yuri was more in-the-loop on castle goings-on than Estelle. Once the police had finished investigating, they had turned to the families of the victims to ask what should be done with it. Though the maids killed had no living family, the victims killed in the years since the house became a museum still had family members to consult. Luckily, consultation had happened on the phone, saving Yuri from having to attend a meeting alongside Alexei. The decision they’d landed on was to seal the elevator door shut and leave Nathaniel’s legacy of terror to rot.

Not that anyone else knew it had been Nathaniel. The police were still working off of Yuri’s vague suggestion of a copycat killer. Flynn had followed Yuri’s lead when he was finally alert enough to be question and claimed to not remember much of the evening. Yuri had followed the case on the news until public interested waned the articles faded from the newspaper. The last conclusion published was that a serial killer had found the secret room and camped out there for an untold number of years. The killer must have snuck in and out of the castle at night to get food and water, and blended in with visitors during the day. The manhunt was still in progress, but since they had no physical description, no one had very high expectations.

“They haven’t started yet,” Yuri told Flynn. “But they promise it will happen soon.” It would be good for the tunnel to be sealed off. Yuri didn’t like the idea of the secret passage getting added to future behind-the-scenes tours. Tourists gawking in the room where his mother had been murdered made him feel sick. He’d almost lost Flynn there, too. Yuri glanced at Flynn’s neck and felt a tug of remembered fear. Flynn had worn scarves until spring truly asserted itself, and now he tended to wear polo shirts with the collar buttoned all the way up. It still didn’t fully hide the scars, and Yuri knew it bothered Flynn to be stared at. For now, the scars were still fresh and vivid, but they would hopefully fade with time.

After leaving the cemetery, they walked a block and then waited for the bus. Yuri stretched his legs and wrapped his left arm around Flynn’s shoulder, in part just because he could. He’d gotten the cast off a week ago and this time he intended to keep it that way.

Flynn leaned into his side-hug. “I still can’t believe Alexei left flowers for her. Does he really think your mom is looking down on him fondly after the way he’s treated you?”

“Maybe it’s how he’s trying to ask forgiveness.” Yuri let out a dark laugh. “There are worse ways of doing that. ‘Course, that would mean Alexei acknowledged he’s done something wrong in his life ever, and that seems unlikely.”

Flynn scowled. “I hate him.”

“Oof, harsh words. He deserves it, though.”

“He’s not even getting into trouble! After everything he did to you - he broke your arm \- all he got was paid leave and then nothing came of it!”

“The fact that he was put on leave at all, paid or not, is honestly more than I expected.” Alexei claimed the fracture on Yuri's arm had been an accident, caused by an innocuous tug that only caused injury because of the pre-existing fracture. Somehow, the doctor's report got buried, and everything else was deemed either 'not technically illegal' or 'not enough evidence.' As frustrating as this was, Yuri was almost grateful the case had been dropped. Going into nitty-gritty details of every awful thing Alexei had ever done to him and being grilled for exact dates and any possible physical evidence while preparing his testimony had been one of the most uncomfortable experiences of Yuri’s life. Doing it all over again, in front of a jury and then having everything picked apart by lawyers sounded like a nightmare. 

But, the last time Yuri had Googled Alexei’s name, the entire first page of results were news articles about the allegations. Sure, there were Twitter threads calling Yuri a liar among many other much worse words, who claimed Yuri was trying to ruin a good man’s career over mild family drama, but there were just as many speaking up in support and echoing Flynn’s outrage when the charges were dropped. Alexei still had his job, but his reputation would never recover. It was the best outcome Yuri had dared hope for.

On the bus, they let their conversation shift to happier topics. Flynn began rambling about class registration and orientation meetings for the University of Zaphias’ law program. Yuri still felt shitty about ruining Flynn’s chances of going to Aspio, but Flynn had seemed genuinely excited when he called Yuri to announce he’d gotten an acceptance letter from U Zaphias. It wasn’t the school he’d wanted, but Yuri knew that a guy like Flynn would be successful no matter where he got his degree.

They arrived at Flynn’s house just before two. Actually, Yuri supposed it was his house now. Mrs. Scifo had been thrilled to take Yuri in, and now Yuri lived in a constant dance of politely declining her baked goods. It wasn’t only that Mrs. Scifo had a habit of adding truly bizarre ingredients to her cooking (Yuri couldn’t forget the time he bit into a blueberry muffin and was greeted by an overwhelming flavour of salt and pepper) but also that she was distracted, forgetful, and didn’t notice when her biscuits began to go mouldy. Keeping the fridge stocked with food that had yet to expire was one of Yuri’s most important jobs in the house.

Yuri sat down to wait for Brave Vesperia in Yuri’s room. It was really Flynn’s room, because they hadn’t yet bought a bed to put in the extra room and also there was no room for it among the piles of boxes and clutter. Sleeping in Flynn’s childhood bedroom had felt a little odd at first, and Yuri had bust out laughing when he opened the closet door and found a sexy poster of Viggo Mortenson from The Lord of the Rings. He had almost forgotten about Flynn’s childhood crush and wondered if Flynn debated taking it down every time he came home to visit, but noted Flynn never had. Yuri just hoped he lived up to the Aragorn fourteen-year-old Flynn had dreamed about.

Just after two, they heard a banging on the door and then Mrs. Scifo called, “Boys! Your friends are here!”

They met the group in the living room. A plate of cookies sat on the table, which smelled fine but Yuri didn’t entirely trust. After a chorus of hellos, they got settled onto the couches.

“So,” Yuri said, “what’s the latest news, boss?”

“The news is great!” Karol gushed. “Our Patreon has exploded! Well… there are also a lot of angry emails calling us scammers, but a lot of positive ones too!”

As Karol had hoped, their footage from the castle investigation had been sensation. When it was coupled with the attention Yuri and Flynn had received for ‘narrowly escaping a serial killer’ that had made headlines across the country, they had gone from a tiny local organization to one of the most well-known paranormal groups in the country overnight. Already, dozens of Youtube videos existed to debunk the paranormal evidence on their videos that had gone viral. Yuri had been amused to listen to the various explanations of how some things were definitely camera tricks, while another person asserted that the same footage had been done live with props. With the sheer number of new backers interested in their stuff, Yuri’s concerns about being forever unemployed had faded. He hadn’t expected to make a living as a Youtuber, but the castle investigation had launched Brave Vesperia from a hobby to a potential career.

Estelle said, “We have a few potential cases to work next.” The smile on her face when she was ‘we’ was infectious. They hadn’t done any more investigations since finishing at the castle, and Estelle was clearly brimming with excitement to finally start a case as an official member of Brave Vesperia. She was probably bored, too, since the castle had been closed for all of April.

“Assuming you guys feel up to it, of course,” Karol said.

Yuri felt guilty for once again being the reason Brave Vesperia had gone on hiatus. His doctor had been adamant about him taking it easy and resting while he recovered from the concussion. At least this time he could share the blame with Flynn, who had taken a couple of weeks off school and spent most of them sleeping.

“I can do it,” Flynn said. “I probably won’t be running around, but if this is a normal case where we spend most of it sitting around listening to floors creak, I can handle that.”

“Same here,” Yuri said. He picked up a cookie, carefully inspected it and deemed it to have been cooked within the last week, and took a bite. “I’m getting pretty bored sitting around. What do you have for us?”

“Well, there’s the theatre,” Karol said. “After you got famous, the manager got in touch with us and asked if we’d like to come back. I think he’s hoping for more publicity. And there were two other cases that looked interesting.”

Raven leaned forward from his armchair. “I like the one with the baby crying in the attic. Sounds spooky.”

Rita rolled her eyes. “Sounds fake, more like it. We may have gotten a lot more enquiries, but we probably also got a lot more fakes looking to get famous.”

“I like the preschool,” Judith said. “Based on the profile they sent us, it’s hard to say of the disappearing items are just little kids losing things, or a ghost.”

Estelle shuddered. “The teacher said that sometimes when she does a headcount, there’s one extra student. But when she goes through again to figure out who isn’t on her list, it’s back to the proper amount.”

Flynn rubbed his chin. “That’s intriguing.”

Two months ago, he and Yuri would have rolled their eyes and said the teacher should be more careful counting in the first place. Now, the idea of a ghostly child lurking among the living sounded completely plausible. Yuri said, “The preschool does sound interesting, and if there’s something there, I’d worry about the kids. But, I think we should go back to the theatre and finish what we started.”

“What’s the point?” Rita said. “We already checked it out and found nothing. The guy’s just looking to boost popularity because no one wants to spend their evenings sitting in an uncomfortable chair listening to some barista sing about her feelings.”

Estelle pouted. “Musical theatre is a wonderful art form.”

Yuri said, “Oh, there’s a ghost in there. It tried to kill me last winter.”

After a short pause, the entire group turned on him with shouts of incredulity.

“Ya maybe could have mentioned this at the time?” Raven said.

“Sorry.” Yuri shrugged. “At the time I didn’t believe it, and then we were busy with the castle, and it kinda slipped my mind. But, yeah, there’s a ghost there that’s proved to be dangerous, so it’s probably smart to start there.”

“Uh, yeah,” Raven said. “That would be good ta take of.”

“I like that plan,” Judith said, and the rest of the group chipped in their agreements.

Flynn rubbed Yuri’s knee and quietly said, “This time, you’re staying firmly on the ground the whole time, alright?”

Yuri kissed Flynn’s cheek. “If it makes you feel better, though technically last time I did get hurt on the ground.”

“From hitting the ground very fast.”

“Still on the ground.”

And so it was that the next Friday night, Brave Vesperia rolled up outside His Majesty’s Theatre. They unloaded the equipment and positioned cameras strategically through the building. Yuri found himself standing in the centre aisle, looking up at the stage that had nearly killed him.

The door behind him pushed open and Flynn’s voice called, “Feeling alright?”

“I’m fine. A bit funny being back here, is all.”

Flynn came to stand by Yuri’s side and joined him in staring at the stage. In some ways, Flynn’s experience at the theatre had been even worse than Yuri’s because after hitting the stage, Yuri had been unconscious for the terrifying hours after. Yuri rubbed Flynn’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. If anything happens, I’ll just beat the ghost up with a psychic punch.”

Flynn frowned. “Does that actually work?”

“No idea, but I’m looking forward to trying.”

Flynn laughed. “I look forward to seeing it. Come help me carry this camera to the stage.”

Yuri turned away from the stage to help, and as he turned his back on it, the unsettling feeling of being watched crept over him. Yuri Lowell, proud member of Zaphias’ finest ghost hunting team, did believe in ghosts, but he was ready to take the fight to them if they tried anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! 
> 
> Given the state of the world at the time I post this (June 2020, for anyone reading in the future), I feel the need to say something about the ending, specifically Alexei's ending. I finished writing this story last November, with no idea what the dialogue around police officers escaping justice would be like when I posted. I didn't intend for this story to be a political statement, but I feel as if in some way it's become one. If you're disappointed that Alexei escaped punishment due to his rank and connections, well, that happens in real life all the time and that's where you should direct your anger. 
> 
> Beyond that, I also just want to say thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. I love haunted house stories so there's a chance I'll write a sequel about a future case someday. If so, I hope to see you there! If not, have a great day.


End file.
